Life in a Glass House

In keeping with last week's literary comparisons I wanted to talk about Auster's City of Glass with regards to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. From what I've read so far the former appears to be a variation on "film noir," that genre of movies about hard-boiled detectives who run around in the shadows. It's interesting to see how the blacks and whites of these films translate on to the page, not to mention the implosive, invasive themes that are a cornerstone of such films as The Maltese Falcon and Rear Window. Many of these devices are present in Androids as well, though Dick's novel is much less illustrative in its approach to its own mystery.

I finished reading Androids shortly before starting City of Glass. Perhaps it's just because I'm reading them back to back, but the theme of isolation kept jumping out at me as I perused the latter. There are so many frames containing only a single character, despite the fact that these people live in a huge city. Auster's character spends so much time in the head of his imaginary detective that I began to wonder whether or not Auster's character actually existed. This form of isolation is just as present in Androids, in which a bounty hunter must navigate the deserted streets of San Francisco alone as he searches for rogue robots. The bounty hunter is so utterly alone that he fashions a companion similar to Auster's detective by way of an electric sheep. It cannot speak to him, but he finds more comfort in the singular presence of that sheep than in any human. I find it interesting that Auster appears to use the same device in his story about cities: sometimes we are most alone when we are surrounded by people.