The rich harvest of the random
John de Falbe
THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES by Paul Auster Faber, £16.99, pp. 304, ISBN 0571224970 V £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 There is a delightful moment in this novel when Nathan, the narrator, is standing on one side of the street with his nephew, Tom, and they see Nancy Mazzucchelli on the other side. Tom thinks of her as the BPM, the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and he would never dare approach. Nathan simply walks over and starts talking to her. Characters do things like this in Auster novels — they assert themselves over destiny with clear logic and sunny optimism; they know what they want for lunch and they ask for it. The moment is delightful, however, because what animates Auster’s work is the unexpected. The reader knows that Nathan’s action will alter the sequence of events, but he knows too that other events will intervene to make the consequences quite different from what the protagonists anticipate.
Divorced and retired, Nathan has come to Brooklyn ‘looking for a quiet place to die’. One day he finds Tom, whom he has not seen for several years, working at the cash register of a neighbourhood bookstore. What follows is a succession of accidents from which they bounce back and forth, imposing order where they can. Tom’s niece Lucy turns up suddenly, apparently intending to stay with him, but since she won’t speak and she is only nine, the situation is problematic. They try taking her to a female relation in Vermont but they never get there. Instead they are holed up at the Chowder Inn for a few days, which they like so much that they co-opt Harry, Tom’s boss, a New York queen whose past is not what it seems, into a plan to buy it. The plan is derailed by Harry’s sudden death, but this has repercussions that make it seem as if everyone is going to live happily ever afterwards. Except that this is Auster and we know something will come from somewhere to set the comedy rolling again.
A fascination with apparently random acts that wrench the causal chain from its orderly path pervades Auster’s fiction, but what makes it so mysterious and addictive is that the random acts — the coincidences and arbitrary decisions that might seem clumsy or shameless in another author’s hands — somehow feel more real and plausible than when the world behaves well. There is nothing inherently unbelievable in the straightforward account of Tom driving off to Vermont, for example, but its very complacency is unsettling. Tom decides to take a different route because ‘he thought he was looking for a change of scenery’, and then ‘Fortune unexpectedly reached out her arms to him and carried our boy into a different world’. At this point the narrative prepares us for a random event which is funny, bizarre, and utterly convincing.
It is curious to note that the jacket finds it necessary to inform us that Auster ‘explores the wider terrain of contemporary America’ in this novel. This is not very evident. Although the novel is set in America, there is no sense that the author has a sustained critique to purvey. It is to Auster’s credit that he avoids writing a Great American Novel in the manner of some of his contemporaries. The result is that his work has a lightness of touch that gives it resonance beyond just American society. The drama between the unpredictable and what is controlled that unspools in individuals’ lives is universal. Even in his exquisitely deft reference to 9/11 in The Brooklyn Follies, Auster startles the reader into wider reflections at the very instant that he seems to limit his novel to contemporary America.
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