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Not yet 60, Nathan Glass is "looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn." So the narrator of Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies returns from the New York suburbs, seeking only solitude and anonymity.
He finds neither in what turns into a charming, beguiling story about the terrible beauty of families and the redemptive power of love.
The novel is driven more by characters and writing than plot, which unfolds slowly. It's filled with literary allusions, including Thoreau and Melville, but it's not pretentious.
It celebrates the ethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn: "New York, and yet not New York" and "her strong Brooklyn accent ... as if the letter r had atrophied to such a degree that it had been expunged from the English alphabet."
Glass, the narrator, is a retired insurance salesman whose lung cancer is in remission. Divorced and estranged from his only daughter, he's compiling The Book of Human Folly, "an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man."
That career heads in surprising directions after a chance encounter with his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, a lonely, failed academic who works in a bookstore where the owner harbors a mysterious past. The plot eventually involves a forgery of the original manuscript of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but that's not the appeal.
Auster's characters are the draw, especially Glass, who pulls together a family, and "what a family it is. What a motley bunch of messed-up floundering souls."
At one pivotal moment, Glass draws back from a bedroom scene: "Tom and Honey deserve their privacy, and for that reason I will end my report of the night's activities here. If some readers object, I ask them to close their eyes and use their imaginations."
The Brooklyn Follies is one of Auster's most accessible novels. He has a cult following for his New York trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room), experimental and existential detective stories, and the two small movies he helped direct, Smoke and Blue in the Face. He endeared himself to listeners of National Public Radio, gathering real-life tales for the National Story Project, which was turned into a delightful anthology, I Thought My Father Was God.
His writing is packed with surprises. It won't ruin The Brooklyn Follies to reveal it ends happily for the most part. But it ends at 8 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001, just 46 minutes before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
The Brooklyn Follies
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt, 306 pp., $24
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