The repetitions of biography
Why Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 could be exactly what Man Booker judges are looking for Paul Taunton
When the Man Booker Prize widened its eligibility restrictions to all books in English in 2014, it opened the doors to a number of heavyweight American authors. The decision faced criticism, notably from 2011 Booker- winner Julian Barnes, who lamented what he assumed to be a chilling effect on obscure authors: “The unknown Canadian author hasn’t got a chance.”
This remains to be seen. Though an author f rom the United States did win the 2016 prize, Paul Beatty for The Sellout, he wasn’t a household name beforehand. Still, over the coming years, there may be a subconscious temptation to award the prize as a sort of lifetime achievement award for Americans whose novels have never been in Booker contention before. Three of the four Americans on this year’s longlist, in fact, are first- time nominees with histories of critical adulation: Colson Whitehead ( for Underground Railroad), George Saunders ( for Lincoln in the Bardo) and Paul Auster (for 4 3 2 1).
Auster may present the most i nteresting case to watch, as his new novel has a litany of resemblances to previous ones – the kind of intertextuality for which he’s already well known. In a way, each new Auster novel is its own retrospective, something of which many readers can’t seem to get enough. It reminds me of Angus Young telling the New York Daily News he’s sick of hearing that AC/ DC has made the same album 11 times: they’ve made it 12 times.
4 3 2 1 is a novel in four alternating parts about four possible lives of a New Jersey boy named Archie Ferguson. ( The copy editor apparently used charts and colour-coded items to keep everything straight.) “Genetically, they’re the same,” explained Auster in an interview earlier this year, “they do share certain inborn qualities and they all gravitate toward writing in one way or another, but different forms of it.”
The differences between their lives, though ultimately monumental, begin as incidental. “You grow up in a town. It’s pretty arbitrary,” Auster continues. “Your parents have decided to move one place or another, and then you get a whole new set of friends, a whole new set of circumstances.”
The novel flowed out of Auster’s previous two books, memoirs which were, according to him, the first time he examined his childhood “with some care” in his adult life. “It’s not an autobiographical book,” he says of 4 3 2 1, “but it shares my geography and my chronology.”
But wait. Not autobiographical? Auster is nothing if not a master of writing a sort of memoir and telling you it isn’t. Or that it might be, but also might not. Critical writing on his books tend to have discursions like this.
A demonstration might help, so bear with me. Early in 4 3 2 1, New York is described as “the horizontal Babel of human tongues,” while in Auster’s early memoir, The Book of Memory, “A.” imagines “an immense Babel inside him.” In The New York Trilogy’s opener City of Glass, Quinn – while impersonating a P. I. named “Paul Auster” – tails someone whose meandering route through Manhattan traces out “Tower of Babel.” That stakeout begins on a traffic island on the Upper West Side, one of “the traffic islands in the middle of Broadway” referred to in 4 3 2 1, which also spends a lot of time on the Upper West Side of Auster’s early adulthood.
Ferguson # 1 stays at his grandparents’ apartment overlooking Columbus Circle, as does A. in The Book of Memory. Ferguson #3 makes a visit to a brothel on the Upper West Side similar to one made by Fanshawe and the narrator of The Locked Room, which concludes The New York Trilogy. Fanshawe was 16 years old in 1963; Ferguson was born on March 2, 1947, turning 16 in 1963; and the real Paul Auster was born a month before that. All of them are from New Jersey.
In his memoir, Portrait of an Invisible Man, Auster works on an oil tanker and does translation work in Paris, while Fanshawe does the same i n The Locked Room, whose narrator retraces Fanshawe’s steps and ruminates about the Paris sky – as does Ferguson # 1 while in Paris before doing translation work himself.
Both Quinn and Fanshawe famously use red notebooks in The New York Trilogy; Ferguson #4 writes a book called The Scarlet Notebook in 4 3 2 1; Auster’s short essay collection about coincidence is called The Red Notebook, in which he describes meeting his hero Willie Mays, but not having a pen for an autograph. Mays’s most famous play, an over- the- shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, is watched avidly by a young Ferguson #1 in 4 3 2 1.
I’m only scratching the surface here ( don’t get me started on Sandusky, Ohio), and most of these references deal with only his earliest books and his latest. Is it compelling, or is it compulsive? On his part or ours? What has come to exist, regardless, is a lexicon in which many of us are fully invested; as if Auster has a sort of expanded universe – but one that continually folds back in on itself and begins again.
If there’s a centre to all this, it might be Ferguson #4, ultimately the lynchpin of 4 3 2 1. While at summer camp, his new friend and doppleganger Artie Friedman ( one of several other AF’s in the book) dies suddenly of a brain aneurism, a plot point drawn from a pivotal story in Auster’s own childhood ( and in The Red Notebook), when he witnessed a boy struck by lightning. “This is the autobiographical heart of the book,” he says, “what I experienced when I was 14 years old at that summer camp, the l i ghtning storm and the boy closer to me than you are now being killed. It’s something that’s haunted me my entire life and it certainly changed me, changed how I think about the world and being alive.”
A lightning strike: coincidence manifested. While it killed one fictional doppelganger, it birthed t hree more, and perhaps even the obsession with sheer possibility that pervades Auster’s writing – one that has been haunting critics and readers ever since. It’s the potential for everything and every- one to be connected; his tendency at times to begin sentences with an infinitive; the constant returning to the moment before something happens. The wrong number that begins City of Glass. The death of a father that begins Portrait of an Invisible Man. The blank piece of paper in a solitary room that begins The Book of Memory. The letter that reveals Fan- shawe’s disappearance that begins The Locked Room. The birth of a momentarily singular Archie Ferguson at the beginning of 4 3 2 1.
We’ll see if Auster is shortlisted for the Booker Prize on Wednesday. And if not this time, then maybe next time, when he will very likely have taken us on another journey to the beginning.
IT MAY BE TEMPTING TO AWARD AUSTER FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT.