The Brooklyn Follies | Paul Auster

I do like Paul Auster’s stories. There is something about the solitude and the unquiet inner life of his characters that I connect to. Even when his characters lead lives far removed from anything I could ever imagine, I still understand them. I get their motivations, their anxieties and their black view of the world. I choose not to live in that world, even though the space between this choice sometimes seems very slim.

I like Paul Auster because of the affinity I feel towards him and his characters. But I also like Paul Auster for showing me why I choose the other path to live my life on.

So imagine my surprise when I read The Brooklyn Follies right through to discover that Paul Auster had written a book about happiness! With a main character that embraced the joy and the pain of intimate, complex, loving relationships!

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure please of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.

Many online reviews suggested that this book was a sell-out on Auster’s behalf. He wrote it after September 11…at his editors bequest…for money. (As if an author actually making money from his creative endeavours was somehow against the rules, unethical or a cop-out!)

No writer is free of boundaries, expectations or influences. Each book is a snapshot in the time of a writer’s life. A reflection on who they are, where they are and the experiences they’ve had along the way.

The Brooklyn Follies was the happiness injection many people needed after September 11 – it was also the book that Auster felt that he needed to write at that time too. And I for one thank him.

P.S. When I use the word ‘happiness’ in relation to Paul Auster, I do use it loosely. Nothing is ever easy for any of his characters…and well, you’ll just have to read all the way to the end to find the little twist that takes the shine off Nathan’s new-found happiness.

_{Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, retired, estranged from his only daughter, the former life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Glass encounters his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, who is working in a local bookstore—a far cry from the brilliant academic career Tom had begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom’s boss is the colorful and charismatic Harry Brightman—a.k.a. Harry Dunkel—once the owner of a Chicago art gallery, 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 circle of acquaintances. He soon finds himself drawn into a scam involving a forged page of The Scarlet Letter, and begins to undertake his own literary venture, The Book of Human Folly, an account of “every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man.”
 
The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster’s warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving, unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.}