The Novel in Spite of Its Author: The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster

Review by Bruce Collier March 9, 2006 Issue

Nathan Glass is nearing 60. Retired from the insurance business, his cancer in remission, his divorce final, he moves to Brooklyn “to die.” Before checking out, Nathan intends to complete The Book of Human Folly, a personalized account of every stupid wrong move he has made in his “long and checkered career as a man.” While this might be a suitable subject on its own for a fictional memoir, The Brooklyn Follies isn’t about the past. All Nathan has to do is walk out his door for the present, in all its messiness, to hit him in the face like a custard pie.

Several years ago I read and reviewed Auster’s The Book of Illusions. In that book, he told a dark tale—two, actually—and did it without that monotonous, dirge like tone one finds so often when modern writers write about modern life. So it is in this book. Thankfully, his irony meter is also on low. Irony is like Tabasco sauce. A drop is good; a bowl is inedible. Auster’s view seems to be that while life may sometimes be awful, writing about it should never be.

But to get back to the borough, Nathan’s attempted retreat is doomed almost from the start. Within days of moving in, he makes a set of friends and acquaintances whose lives immediately begin to mesh with his. Like much of New York, Brooklyn is composed of neighborhoods, linked in various degrees, like Venn diagrams. The neighborhoods are filled with people to whom “neighbor” is as much verb as noun. Among Nathan’s first observations is this:

I discovered that Brooklynites are less reluctant to talk to strangers than any tribe I had previously encountered. They butt into one another’s business at will...they argue like deranged four-year-olds over disputed parking spaces; they zip out dazzling one-liners as a matter of course.

Nathan makes the acquaintance of Marina, a beautiful, married waitress at his favorite lunch spot. He also befriends Harry Brightman, a bookstore owner with a shady past, planning a shady future. And, though he’s lost a wife, Nathan has gained a long-lost nephew, Tom. The arrival of Nathan’s great-niece Lucy, a child in flight from a bad family situation in North Carolina, pulls Nathan into even wider circles, and action. Contemplating the past becomes far less engaging than living in the present, and for the future.

A lot of expensive stuff happens in The Brooklyn Follies. Much wine and cheese is consumed, many restaurant tabs picked up, many road trips taken. Perhaps anticipating readers’ questions, Auster begins by having Nathan and his ex-wife split a large sum of money when they sell their house. Thus, says Nathan, “there would be more than enough to sustain me until I stopped breathing.” And, one might add, to devote a lot of pages to contemplating Life, Death, and the Big Questions.

These parts are where the book risks losing me. Must we always be asked to admire comfortable intellectuals at table, getting judgmentally inebriated and glibly kicking around the meaning of life? At these points, Auster’s characters venture as much into stereotype as the stereotypes they condemn.

For example, Nathan is a deeply liberal Democrat, an odd combination in a white, 60-ish former insurance man from upstate New York. Frankly, I think Nathan is liberal because Auster himself is liberal (see below). Lucy’s bad family situation is blamed on her “fundamentalist evangelical” southern father, while her mother, an ex-actress and recovered drug addict, gets a pass. The likable Harry, the witty, flamboyantly gay bookstore proprietor, is nevertheless as much of a stock character as a saucy French maid.

Throughout the book, Auster just kicks the story to the side, plants Nathan in the pulpit, and lets fly with diatribes and sermonettes about “Republican thugs” and the “stolen” election of 2000. A writer of Auster’s skill and versatility—novels, screenplays, poetry, and non-fiction—is surely capable of writing compelling characters that don’t all adhere to a single political or social line.

Auster (and his fictional people) are entitled to their politics, of course, but these distracting intermezzi hobble, rather than advance what is actually a pretty interesting story of family, friendship, and spiritual renewal. That is, when the author gets out of the way and lets it happen.

The Brooklyn Follies, Henry Holt and Company, 306 pages, available at online and local booksellers and local libraries.

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