Arthur Saltzman

The detective novel provides some of literature's most durable endow-
ments. Its sureties constitute a method and a message: mystery condenses
then lifts like the day's weather; seemingly encouraged by the very con-
ventions of his context, the hero patiently debrides whatever wound to
propriety summons him; cases wind up tight and smooth as spools. Gor-
dian plots are only, are always, temporary distractions at worst, or prods
to appetite, and thanks to logic's stacked deck, these regularly succumb
to investigation. As the detective whittles raw circumstance into habitable
sense, he is secure in the conviction that at the core all incidents and
outrages conform to code -- each "Eureka" is really "Elementary" after
all. In short, orientation is the detective novel's promise, tractability its
principle. Such is the foundation of our devotion as the Good assumes its
ritual guise and Evil performs the stations of the double-cross. When it
comes to practicing literary convention, novelists, characters, and read-
ers are all insiders, all blissful in the rigging.

Paul Auster has made his reputation largely by invoking the detective
formula in order to steer it into metaphysical tundra. His New York Trilogy
observes the steady disintegration of the motives, means, and results of
inquiry, in which "the presence of the unpredictable, the powers of con-
tingency" ultimately estrange us from those crisp generic assurances ( Art
of Hunger270-271). Although it is in many ways a more straightforward
work than its predecessors, Auster's Leviathan clarifies and extends the
predicament: every author is at once a detective and an artificer, and
these callings are incompatible. Moreover, as we are advised in the course
of the novel, "the real is always ahead of what we can imagine" (180). The
irony is that Leviathan is ostensibly Auster's most realistic novel, yet it is
here that the question of what constitutes reality is rendered more subtle
instead of extinguished. Whatever document results from the novelist's
efforts is essentially a record of incomplete transactions whose authority
must be taken under advisement.

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