the ending perfectly refines and distorts the reader's impression of the novel entirity up to the point of the red book's discovery... finally! auster gets around to something deeply satisfying in his 1st novel.

I'm not sure how angry I should be with the ending. Once again I feel as though Auster is letting his mechanism show. Yes, we're toying with the nature of fiction, and getting into metafiction, and the red notebook is a salient symbol. I'll grant all of that. However, couldn't he make things a little less obvious? To reference Poe as an influence and then invoke "Masque of the Red Death" seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I'd prefer not to have my literature shouting in my face that which I could discover through subtler means. It's more than a touch insulting, and it predisposes me to dismiss Auster as condescending and tactless. Am I wrong in asking my authors to be subtle?

I just don't buy it. It's not that I can't suspend disbelief and imagine Quinn slowly exhausting the possibility of his life, thus wading into an ever growing darkness. The scene does have a very attractive cinematic quality, and it even recalls the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Unlike Marquez, however, Auster conducts his shadowplay in a massive vacuum. Quinn is too large a part of the novel to simply disappear, to be unsummoned. Indeed, he's the "only one." Thus the novel is doomed to be unsummoned at its close, as the entire manuscript is devoted to the exploding of a single character. Are we to play by Auster's rules, and forbid ourselves any further thought about his vanished text? Again, I don't buy it. He cannot will the novel to disappear, and alluding to the inevitability of the temporary existence of a literary object from within that object...I don't know what that is. Must be meta.

Auster's sleight of hand would be better executed in finer grains, in strokes less broad and shades less bold. His ideas, while attractive, are too damn loud. If Auster is commenting on the curious nature of logical fictions (literary characters, long dead icons, and the like), then he is doing it, once again, very bluntly. I feel bludgeoned.

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To be fair, this novel was written a decade ago. None of Auster's revelations were news to me (metafiction, the nature of text, literary objects, etc), but I could see _City of Glass_ making waves at first exposure.

corrected:

the novel's ending perfectly redefines and distorts the whole of the reader's impression of the novel's entirety... finally! auster gets around to something deeply satisfying in his 1st novel. there is real resonance in the novel's ending.

What about Quinn as nothing more than the invented character Auster himself (book version!) needed to get through a particularly unbearable period in his own life?
Not to be repetitive, but if one goes along with the idea that Quinn=Auster, Q. would disappear entirely once his job was done.
And I don't even mean in the sense of a literary character disappearing into the page once the tale ends. In the world of the story itself, Q. fulfills a vital function for Auster, who no longer can manage to exist in his world.
The red notebook isn't just a euphemism for life, it is Q.'s life. And as Auster's necessity to remove his own psyche from a painful reality dissipates, so does the replacement.
I feel life I'm just talking in circles. Grr.
Basically Auster butches up and learns to deal once Quinn's misadventures are over. The red notebook contains the whole of that sad period, and that sad, 2-D life, aka Quinn.
So the discovery of a red notebook, and nothing else isn't surprising. Auster left it there himself. And Q. is the notebook, is Auster, and is the narrator. Hence, the narrator states at the end that Quinn will always be a part of him, and he can't help not liking Auster very much.
All the little pieces of one man.

One touchingpoint: based upon some side comment that MGK (is it straight that I call you that, or is it Professor Kirchenbaum?) made was how Auster's central character (in most of his novels) are often Writers who went through some sort of familial tradjedy. One aspect of the book that seems to have faded within the sub-text is isolation. There is no real connection between characters and if there is, it is so thin. Auster seems to stretch plausibilty within interaction between people, and I like that. It feels distant and hazy, and yet believeable. The isolation seems like a reflection on city life as a chaotic wasteland.

oohh(not the sound i'm trying to make...how about 'ou' like 'you' without the y?)
i like that last bit, faryan, distant & hazy...isolation as a reflection on city life...
ya, what's that old saying? People always say it about NYC especially, the best way to lose yourself is to surround yourself in a crowd? Or rather, you're never so alone or so lonely as when you are surrounded by others?
I can't quite remember the exact phrasing. But i'm sure you know what i mean.
With 'City of Glass' it's so easy for me to lose sight of a major theme like isolation. I can't seem to help but be sucked into the spiral of micromeanings and endless possibilities within this story.
i guess MGK is right, one could likely spend an entire semester on this one book. If, that is, one didn't become bored. heh.

Not so much about the end of the novel, but in a way that it has entered my thoughts.

Due to the massive amount of reading I have in this and my other courses, in addition to two jobs, I've finally bought a planning book to sort it all out. There is my life there, reduced to, as Prof. K so elegently phrased it, "source code". One could determine much of my interestes, personality traits, and frustrations simply by examining the places I have to be and what they entail.

The notebook itself is, of course, red.

Yes, the red notebook will guide you to the real world. Just like the red pill.

Aha! You've figured it all out!