The final part of The New York Trilogy. The first part to be told in the first person. The evolving Trilogy witnesses Auster moving away from the European poetic sensibilities assimilated through his translations of André du Bouchet and imitations of Beckett to produce, in The Locked Room, his most obviously novelistic and American work. A particularly sharp example of a book that owes more than just a character's name to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his fellow 19th-century American novelists.