Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies begins in the late 1990s when his middle-aged hero, Nathan Glass, sets out to find “a quiet place to die.” Actually, “unlikely hero” is closer to the mark, for Nathan is a lovably shambling figure, a failure at fatherhood, marriage and life. His daughter won’t speak to him. His ex-wife hates him with the fire of a thousand suns. His only friends are his nephew Tom—a grad student turned cabbie—and Harry, an art forger, ex-con and rare-books dealer who is gayer than a tap-dancing dragon on Chinese New Year’s.
Nathan isn’t really dying, anyway. He’s also not really looking for a place to die, since his cancer is in remission and he is too busy trying to redeem his meritless life. He has plenty of strength left to do a good deed a day, inviting our extravagant applause. Indeed, The Brooklyn Follies, narrated by Nathan, represents his own fiercely self-deprecating autobiography, a continuing project he calls The Book of Human Folly. In it, he details “every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act [he has] committed during [his] long and checkered career as a man.”
As it happens, most of Nathan’s “inane acts” are studiously well-intentioned, proofed against criticism. Early in his conversation with his readers, Nathan says: “There is something nasty about me at times.” We never see it. He buys a gift for a beautiful Puerto Rican waitress; her husband beats her for it. How can we blame Nathan, a good-natured oldster? The waitress, for her part, dutifully vanishes from our concern.
He sets up a meeting between shy, lovesick Tom and the object of Tom’s desire, a neighborhood woman Tom has named the B.P.M., or Beautiful Perfect Mother. This meeting leads not to the sort of cringe-making indignity one might expect (not to mention enjoy) but to a fruitful friendship. Where’s the fun in that?
Tom’s young niece, Lucy, the daughter of his elaborately dysfunctional sister, shows up on his doorstep; Nathan drops everything and takes her to stay with relatives in Vermont. When she sabotages his gas tank with Coca-Cola (a neat trick for a nine-year-old), he takes her in himself. Is Nathan an avatar of Human Folly or a candidate for canonization?
Once St. Nathan of Prospect Park has rescued Lucy and her mother from Christian cultists, nearly rescued his pal Harry from a double-cross, reconciled with his daughter and found love, we realize that his “follies” are pretty uniformly “victories.” No surprise there—it’s been clear all along that Mr. Auster wants nothing but sympathy for his character.
Mr. Auster has been praised for the clarity of his writing. But in The Brooklyn Follies, he achieves such clarity by steeping his prose in familiar tropes and phrases. There are “big-boned peasant bodies,” “flickers of desire,” “jovial spirits,” “hushed voices,” “heavy hearts” and “futile attempts.” This parade of cliché may be in keeping with Nathan’s voice, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant for the reader.
Where Mr. Auster’s language is pedestrian, his anecdotes and characters are doubly so. It’s disappointing that Mr. Auster, a long-time Brooklyner, would choose to sketch such Fat Albert-like cartoons of urban life. His neighborhood types are impossible to dislike. Their confected follies are folded up neater than origami cranes—and, likewise, tossed aside without a second thought. Why does the novel, self-consciously “big-hearted” and “life affirming,” conclude with a throwaway allusion to the impending 9/11 catastrophe? Hard to know—and even harder to care.