Frederick's Reviews > Ghosts

I've termed GHOSTS a novel, but that's because it is a stand-alone book. At 96 pages, it is really a novella. When I review THE NEW YORK TRILOGY, of which "Ghosts" is the middle story, I will call it a novella. In any case, it's much more of a sustained narrative than the first part, "City Of Glass," and I think, then, that page numbers alone don't make this a novella and "City Of Glass" a novel. They are stylistically different. "Ghosts" is definitely a novella in the Jamesian sense. It could be recited from a stage with a short intermission and it would be singularly powerful.
It is the story of a hired snoop being snooped on and, while filled with Auster's patented literary Escherisms, it also has the sense of forboding which makes Auster's world the sphere of the damned. Just as "City Of Glass" referred to Cervantes, "Ghosts" puts Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville in the caravan careening around a New York of the lost.