Auster's tale of family dynamics past and present from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .' So begins Paul Auster's remarkable novel, The Brooklyn Follies. Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in ...
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Auster's tale of family dynamics past and present from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .' So begins Paul Auster's remarkable novel, The Brooklyn Follies. Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career, and, indeed, from life in general. Having accidentally ended up in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with life and passion. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that offers them the possibility of redemption. Infused with character, mystery and humour, these lives intertwine and become bound together as Auster brilliantly explores the wider terrain of contemporary America - a crucible of broken dreams and of human folly.
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In an important scene in Paul Auster's novel, "The Brooklyn Follies", Tom Wood, a major character in the book and a student of literature, tells the story of Franz Kafka and a doll. During the last year of Kafka's life, he met a young girl in a park lamenting the loss of her doll. Kafka began writing letters to the girl, telling stories of the doll's life, leading to the doll's marriage. After three weeks of Kafka's stories, the girl no longer missed the doll. And Tom continues, "Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enought to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists." (p. 156)
Auster's novel describes how people can both come to terms with their own stories and live in reality as well. The book is set in Brooklyn in the year before September 11, 2001. The narrator of the story is Nathan Glass, a secular Jew 59 years old who has recently retired from his career of selling life insurance. Nathan's marriage of 33 years has just ended in divorce, and, Nathan hopes, his lung cancer is in remission. He moves to Brooklyn, where he lived for the first three years of his life, ostensibly to bring "a silent end to my sad and ridiculous life." (p. 1)
Nathan's 29 year-year old daughter,a PhD in biochemistry. from whom he has been estranged, advises him to develop some interests and to get a new life. Father and daughter quarrel and Nathan appears left to his own devices. But gradually he turns his life around. He conceives the project of writing a book "The Book of Human Folly" giving Nathan's own experiences with this universal subject. He has a reunion with his long-lost nephew Tom, mentioned above, who has given up on his PhD dissertation on Melville's long poem, "Clarel" and is driving a taxi in the city. He meets people in his Brooklyn neighborhood, including a young married waitress with whom he becomes infatuated and Harry Brightwood, with a checkered past and the owner of a used and rare book store. He somehow becomes the guardian of his nine-year old niece when she arrives at Tom's doorstep on morning. And ultimately Nathan enjoys a romantic and sexual relationship with a widow of about his own age, Joyce, of Italian and Catholic background, who is the mother of a beautiful women with whom Tom had become infatuated.
The book tells of how both Nathan and Tom work their way towards a better life and towards a type of secular redemption. The book reads with an easy and graceful flow and all the characters, both major and minor, are masterfully delineated. Nathan and Tom spend time discussing life and literature, including the discussion of Kafka, above, but focusing more on early American writers such as Poe, Thoreau, and Melville. While these discussions flow seamlessly into the story, the novel is much more concerned with the heart than with the mind. In the best scene in the novel, Tom, seemingly broken and romantically alone, receives an unforgettable evening visit while in Vermont from a woman named Honey Chowder. Honey leaves her job as a schoolteacher and comes to New York City in what results in a successful pursuit of Tom. In a similar manner, the elderly Nathan is reawakened by his attachment to Joyce and by his efforts at reconciliation with his daughter and by the connections he reestablishes with his family, if not with his ex-wife.
The scenes of Brooklyn, its diversity, streets, and people are vividly, if sentimentally, described. Tom and Nathan learn the lesson of allowing other people to choose and live their own lives while savoring the lives and opportunities that they have for themselves. Nathan changes his project from writing a story of human folly to writing the biographies of the people that he meets every day on the streets of Brooklyn --celebrating the people whose stories ordinarily remain untold. (I was reminded of O Henry.) And Tom has a promising life ahead with the endlessly endearing Honey.
The novel is easy to read with a good deal of heart and some wisdom. It shouldn't be over-intellectualized. But I was reminded of a recent difficult study by the philosopher Charles Taylor called "The Secular Age." Taylor describes, very simply, how some people look for the purpose of life in transcendence while others see the good life as involving exclusively the physical world in which we find ourselves. This novel takes place in this latter, secular plane, as both Nathan and Tom, work towards their own form of life and redemption by changing their attitude towards everydayness and towards their own opportunities rather than by seeking a refuge in or a return to a religious belief. The secular vision of the good life, I think, is a quiet underpinning for Auster's fine novel.
Robin Friedman
greebs
May 10, 2007
Auster gets back in the game
The Brooklyn Follies begins with Nathan Glass moving to Brooklyn. He says it?s to find a place to die, though as the novel goes on it is clear he?s looking to begin a new life. Through chance (an Auster staple) he comes across his nephew Tom, and through a variety of lovely sequences, reconnects with others in his family. If this book is more straightforward than some of his earlier works, it doesn?t make it less poignant and in a lot of ways, Auster is telling a more mainstream story here. It?s about a man rediscovering what?s important to him after a bout with cancer, a failed marriage and a falling out with his daughter. It?s about what people will really do when they are given a second chance. And it?s about hope. This hope, of course ? because it?s an Auster book ? is not laced with daisies and candy canes. It?s more of delayed trauma. That?s because, as it becomes clearer as you work towards the end of the book, that Auster has put specific dates into his chapters for a reason. The book starts around the Bush-Gore election of 2000 and ends in September 2001. (This same device of driving towards 9/11 was used in an even more dramatic way in Nelson DeMille?s Night Fall, by the way.) I will add that Auster?s politics ? which seem to be identical to mine ? sometimes get in the way of the plot. Hearing Glass tell his girlfriend to always vote Democrat and that George Bush is an evil idiot is nice, but it distracted from the story in an unnecessary way.
All that being said, The Brooklyn Follies is a great book, refreshing and rewarding. If it is not the dark, creepy tales Auster has shown us before, that?s okay too.
