Novel long, engaging, sometimes profound
Albert Camus once wrote of “the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”
We do the same thing to writers. Take as evidence Paul Auster, who was lauded for his brilliant “New York Trilogy” (1985-86), his first three novels. He borrowed the language of detective fiction, then ripe for rehabilitation, and mingled it with games borrowed from high literature. The effect was magical and grounded at once.
But readers and critics eventually turned against Auster, culminating in a mocking incineration of his body of work several years ■ ago in The New Yorker.
What happened? In subsequent novels, the author settled into a pattern. Nearly all of them involve mistaken identity, mysterious texts and mischievous self-references. Slowly, it dawned on readers that Auster’s puzzles might simply be meaningless — cheap shortcuts to gravity.
Few authors are consistently great, and to judge Auster by the intermittent failure of his tricks is to forget his first and most significant gift: storytelling. It is present in fierce abundance in “4 3 2 1,” his new novel, which, at nearly 900 pages and coming after a silence of seven years, feels like a bid to re-enter the top tier of U.S. authors.
“4 3 2 1” is about Archie Ferguson, born in Newark in 1947, as Auster was. For a while, it follows Archie in conventional-narrative fashion, introducing his father, an ambitious store owner, and his mother, a photographer, and their complex families.
Then the novel splits into four parallel timelines. In one, his family grows very rich; in another, his father dies early and unexpectedly; in another, he becomes a writer. We watch Archie lose his various virginities and meet the same people in different ways, in each scenario slipping past paths he took elsewhere.
What emerges is an imperfect but “greatish” book. The central thesis — that life depends on chance, on random moments of choice — seems too obvious to need expression.
“4 3 2 1” is far too long, and its prose, though chatty and readable, is often amateurish. (Archie can’t just read a book, it’s an “immense tome by blacklisted former journalist William Shirer, which won the National Book Award in 1961.”)
On the other hand, his company from line to line is a joy, and each of Archie’s four destinies, stories spilling across stories, is genuinely engaging. They’re just not always profound.