Dysfunctional but functioning

The Brooklyn Follies
by Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Co. br>320 pages

With lung cancer in remission, divorced and estranged from his only daughter, 60-year old Nathan Glass discovers you can go home and still lead a full life. In Nathan’s case, home is Brooklyn. Set against the 2000 US elections and reaching its conclusion at 8 a.m., the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, moments before the attack on the World Trade Center, Paul Auster’s latest novel is a paean to a time when things were simpler and more innocent. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster lite, and that isn’t meant pejoratively, as it is a welcome facet to this talented writer’s prowess.

Paul Auster has always been a personal favorite. To me, he’s like an American counterpart to Ian McEwan. Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo, The Book of Illusions, and Oracle Night – they’re all part of an impressive corpus of work. Skillfully plotted, very urbane, yet imbued with a darkness and foreboding that’s unique among American writers, Auster’s books always carry a visceral punch that comes from way left field. While The Brooklyn Follies can be viewed as a mellowing of sorts, it still carries enough of the trademark elements of Auster territory to make it an engrossing read. I got my copy at Fully Booked.

Nathan Glass is a wonderful Auster creation. It’s like having the living embodiment of Oscar the Grouch – Hmmm, is Sesame Street in Brooklyn? – leaping off the pages. Rather than giving us someone fuzzy and lovable, Auster first stacks the cards against our protagonist, revealing warts, blemishes and scratchy, rough surfaces that make Nathan so real. Written in Nathan’s first person point-of-view, he relates how his daughter Rachel has been trying to get him, post-remission, to find something that will occupy him in life: "...to get involved with something, to invent a project for myself. Rachel is not a stupid person. She has a doctorate in bio-chemistry... but much like her mother before her, it’s a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes – all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom."

"I explained that I was probably going to be dead before the year was out, and I didn’t give a flying fuck about projects. My only child has inhabited this earth for 29 years, and not once has she come up with an original remark, with something absolutely and irreducibly her own." Don’t know about you, but I just can’t resist a character like Nathan, and I was hooked till the end of the novel, with him as guide to all that transpires.

Tom Glass, Nathan’s nephew, is the other main character. They quickly evolve as the dysfunctional double-act that will dominate this book. Tom had a glittering academic career and without warning froze when dissertation time came around, proceeded to drive a taxi for some time, and works for a shady bookstore owner named Harry Brightman when we first meet him. Tom is seriously overweight and has not had a serious relationship for some time.

Harry Brightman is one of the more colorful creations of Auster. Originally from Chicago, gay to the bone, but was married and with a daughter, having done time for art fraud and now running the bookstore, which has taken in strays like Tom, Harry is one of those exquisite hothouse flowers who touches the lives of all those around him in many ways. An extremely goodhearted, but weak person – we’ve all had our share of brushing against the larger-than-life Harrys in our own lives.

There’s also a cast of exceptional interesting women who populate this novel: Tom’s sister who married a fanatical born-again Christian, her daughter (father unknown), Tom’s Brooklyn crush (Tom calls her his BPM – Beautiful Perfect Mother) and the woman from upstate New York who eventually becomes his true love, BPM’s mother with whom Nathan develops something. There all these interlinking stories and personages that give the novel a real Brooklyn neighborhood community feel, a tapestry upon which Auster weaves his magic.

All these people that inhabit his novel are never anything less than entertaining. And yet, the wonderful thing is how Auster has cast them and given them a hue that enthralls, while maintaining the realization that these are the people who you cross the street with, the people who queue to watch a movie, ride the subway or bus – the ordinary folks. These are not celebrities or TV personalities, and yet, they all possess a magical quality, thanks to Auster’s pen.

As can be expected, a hint of menace and wrongdoing emanates from Brightman as he plans one grand gesture to help those who mean something to him. The wonder of how he succeeds even as things go tragically awry form part of the wonderful plotting and hubris that Auster gives us. It’s the richness of texture and overlay of sympathy for most of the characters that make this a very entertaining read.

Auster’s love for writing, and books in general, form part of this richness in texture. Taking the cue from Brightman’s first editions bookstore business, we have wonderful passages about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Franz Kafka. We have arcane conversations about authors and their premature deaths. We even have the lighthearted moment when BPM revels that her married surname is Joyce, and her husband is named Jimmy.

Bottom line, it’s Auster’s masterful handling of his material and how he sweeps us along with the lives of his characters that keep us turning the pages, eager to see how things will go, how these characters will fare. This may be a departure of sorts from the customary sinister overlay that Auster had us connecting with in his previous novels; but the connection is still there, even if of a more airy, ebullient quality.