The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel - Hardcover

Auster, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805077146 ISBN 13: 9780805077148

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2005

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions, an exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man's accidental redemption

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore--a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York." Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances--not to mention a stray relative or two--and leads him to a reckoning with his past.
Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man." But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others.
The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster's warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, and Timbuktu. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was also a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

Auster’s previous fiction, from Moon Palace to The Book of Illusions, earned him the reputation as a modern experimentalist. At first glance, Brooklyn Follies appears to break from this categorization. In fact, notes the San Francisco Chronicle, the novel "is a classical work of American literature in the most traditional 19th century meaning of the phrase." Bound by the idea of human connection, coincidence, and possibility, Brooklyn Follies features flawed but mostly believable characters (including, of course, Auster’s place of residence, Brooklyn itself), diamond-hard prose, and many plot threads, some of them unconvincing. Yet, in a typical Austerian move, there’s more than meets the eye … It’s perhaps a minor Auster work, but one that may surprise fans.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

After a "sad and ridiculous life" in the suburbs, Nathan Glass retires, gets divorced, and moves to Brooklyn to die. To pass the time, he decides to write an account of mishaps and mistakes, beginning with his own—"The Book of Human Folly." "The tone would be light and farcical throughout," he says, "and my only purpose was to keep myself entertained." Auster seems to have had a similar intent. A chance encounter with a long-lost nephew leads Nathan into an unlikely second act, involving a longer-lost niece, her runaway daughter, and a host of lively Brooklyn caricatures—a gay used-bookstore owner, a tough widow, an H.I.V.-positive drag queen—all in the midst of unlikely second acts themselves. Nathan narrates increasingly absurd events with persistent cheer, a tone mirrored by the blinkered optimism and liberal conviction of pre-9/11 Park Slope; it's a combination that soon seems less hopeful than hollow, and profoundly disengaged.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

I don't know if they still do it, but bookstores in college towns used to keep the novels of Paul Auster behind the cash register, out of customers' reach. Apparently they were among the most frequently shoplifted books, along with those by Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, whose Beat romances extolling life outside the bounds of polite society will surely be inspiring acts of literary larceny a hundred years from now.

Hard-up, light-fingered undergrads were probably drawn to Auster's earlier novels -- works like Moon Palace, The Music of Chance and those making up his New York Trilogy -- because they contained all kinds of brooding, fate-tossed characters whose existential angst aggrandized their own. They may also have found irresistible Auster's plots, many of which hinged on fantastic coincidences that irrevocably altered his characters' lives. When you're 19 and living away from your parents for the first time, it's exciting to think that some chance encounter might usher you toward your destiny.

But any young scholar thinking about claiming the five-finger discount on The Brooklyn Follies, Auster's newest, might want to wait and see if other, more licit, discounts will eventually apply. After all, selection by Oprah Winfrey for her book club usually results in a significantly reduced price at the major chain bookstores.

What's that? Paul Auster jockeying for a spot on the midcult must-read list? Wait a second -- he writes intricately structured, darkly ironic novels of ideas, doesn't he? Don't worry. He still can; just witness Oracle Night, his 2003 meditation on literature's puzzling relationship to consciousness. Still, for whatever reason, Auster has decided that the time has come to try something much more conventional: a big-hearted, life-affirming, tenderly comic yarn. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But really, how will this piece of candy be greeted by those who have grown accustomed to the darker, stronger stuff?

With gratitude and encouragement, one hopes. In many ways, The Brooklyn Follies is a welcome sign that Auster, whose fictional universe can too often seem mechanistic and overdetermined, is finally relaxing a little. Nathan Glass, the story's 59-year-old narrator, is the rare Austerian figure who could be described as easygoing. Though his life has hardly been trouble-free -- his ex-wife hates him, his only daughter resents him, and he's just undergone treatment for lung cancer -- he's remarkably unhaunted and greets life's obstacles with good humor and equanimity. Though he tells us in his first sentence that he has moved from the suburbs back to Brooklyn, where he was born, "looking for a quiet place to die," it's not long before we realize the whole Thanatos thing is just part of his shtick. Nathan is really looking for a good place to start over.

When he encounters his nephew, Tom, working behind the counter at a local bookstore, the two reconnect instantly and become inseparable. Like his Uncle Nat, Tom is floundering: The former academic star has jettisoned his aspirations as a teacher and literary critic and is living alone in a tiny apartment, waiting for meaning to return to his life. And then it does, literally walking into his front door in the form of his 9-year-old niece, Lucy: the daughter of a troubled sister who has disappeared. But if Tom and Nathan think that Lucy's arrival will help clear up the mystery of what happened to her mother, they're mistaken. Though she's clearly intelligent, and more than a little cagey, the child is absolutely silent on that matter and all others.

In the meantime, Tom has become smitten with a neighborhood beauty -- married with kids -- whom he barely knows. A trip to New England introduces two more troubled souls: a morose innkeeper, perpetually mourning for his late wife, and his middle-aged daughter, fearful of a spinster's future. The manner in which everyone's miseries converge and nullify one another is what defines The Brooklyn Follies, ultimately, as a comedy. Suffice it to say that by the end, the partner-less are happily partnered, the long-lost are returned, and love finally flourishes where dread once thrived. All just in time for Sept. 11, 2001 -- the day Nathan ends his account. Dread has just been forestalled, of course, not vanquished.

"Never underestimate the power of books," Nathan reminds us. Taken out of context, it's a banal proverb. But juxtaposed with another passage from The Brooklyn Follies, it cuts straight to the theme at the heart of so much of Auster's work: that the stories we tell one another are more than mere entertainments. In one of Tom's many literary discussions with his uncle, he relays the anecdote of Kafka and the doll. Near the end of his life, living in Berlin with his lover, Kafka went for a walk in the park and saw a little girl crying. He asked her what the matter was, and she told him that she had lost her doll. Without missing a beat, Kafka assured the little girl that the doll wasn't lost, only traveling; Kafka knew this for a fact, he said, because the doll had written him a letter describing her journeys, which he promised to bring the girl the next day. Every day for three weeks, he brought the girl a new letter that he had spent much of the previous night composing, until she could no longer remember why she had been sad in the first place. "She has the story," Tom tells Nathan, "and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear."

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. Nathan Glass, a retired life insurance salesman estranged from his family and facing an iffy cancer prognosis, is "looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn." What he finds, though, in this ebullient novel by Brooklyn bard Auster (Oracle Night), is a vital, big-hearted borough brimming with great characters. These include Nathan's nephew, Tom, a grad student turned spiritually questing cab driver; Tom's serenely silent nine-year-old niece, who shows up on Tom's doorstep without her unstable mom; and a flamboyant book dealer hatching a scheme to sell a fraudulent manuscript of The Scarlet Letter. As Nathan recovers his soul through immersion in their lives, Auster meditates on the theme of sanctuary in American literature, from Hawthorne to Poe to Thoreau, infusing the novel's picaresque with touches of romanticism, Southern gothic and utopian yearning. But the book's presiding spirit is Brooklyn's first bard, Walt Whitman, as Auster embraces the borough's multitudes—neighborhood characters, drag queens, intellectuals manqué, greasy-spoon waitresses, urbane bourgeoisie—while singing odes to moonrise over the Brooklyn Bridge. Auster's graceful, offhand storytelling carries readers along, with enough shadow to keep the tale this side of schmaltz. The result is an affectionate portrait of the city as the ultimate refuge of the human spirit. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Just when you think you've got Auster pegged, he shape-shifts. Not that his mesmerizing new novel isn't instantly recognizable as an Auster tale, what with its beautifully ruminative narration, obsessive charting of seemingly quotidian details, cleverly meandering and impressionistically noirish plot, and literary allusions, in this case, to Hawthorne, Kafka, and Gaddis. But this addition to his increasingly tender cycle of love songs to Brooklyn is his most down-to-earth, sensuous, and socially conscious novel to date. Harry Brightman, formerly Harry Dunkel, which means dark, is a gay man who owns a used bookstore in Brooklyn and previously served time for forgery. Once a rogue, always a rogue? Auster's shrewd and charming narrator, Nathan Glass, suspects so. A 59-year-old divorced lung-cancer survivor retired from the life-insurance business and estranged from his family, Nathan plans to sulk in Brooklyn. Instead, he reconnects with his nephew, Tom, who works for Harry. Tom is also depressed, and worried about his missing sister, Aurora, when out of the blue, Aurora's eerily self-possessed nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lucy, appears. As fate has its way with his irresistible characters, the sorcerer-like Auster rhapsodizes about nature, orchestrates unlikely love affairs and hilarious conversations, and considers such extreme experiences as a life in pornography and marriage to a tyrannical religious fanatic. Auster also takes subtle measure of a time that will live in infamy, the era of the 2000 election and September 11, 2001. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I opened our Rand McNally Road Atlas and studied the map of Vermont. "Get off at Exit Three," I said to Tom. "We're looking for Route Thirty, which squiggles up diagonally to the northwest. After about forty miles, we'll start bobbing and weaving until we get to Rutland, find Route Seven, and take that straight to Burlington."
Why do I linger over these trivial details? Because the truth of the story lies in the details, and I have no choice but to tell the story exactly as it happened. If we hadn't made that decision to get off the highway at Brattleboro and follow our noses to Route Thirty, many of the events in this book never would have taken place. I am thinking especially of Tom when I say that. Both Lucy and I profited from the decision as well, but for Tom, the long-suffering hero of these Brooklyn Follies, it was probably the most important decision of his life. At the time, he had no inkling of the
consequences, no knowledge of the whirlwind he had set in motion. Like Kafka's doll, he thought he was simply looking for a change of scenery, but because he left one road and took another, Fortune unexpectedly reached out her arms to him and carried our boy into a different world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805077146
• ISBN 13: 9780805077148
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320