THE FIRST PAUL Auster novel I ever read was Moon Palace, back around 1990. I almost immediately went back to read its predecessors, New York Trilogy and In the Country of Last Things, and the two autobiographical essays published as The Invention of Solitude, and subsequently read every other Auster novel as they were published. I mean...I loved Paul Auster.
Almost very other Auster novel, I should say, because I had been avoiding 4 3 2 1. For its length, mainly...866 pages. I associate Auster with a certain Gallic focus and concision, along the lines of Blanchot or Michon, say, and a door-stopper Auster novel didn't seem like it could be an Auster novel, if you see what I mean. Then too, the reviews I read ran lukewarm. So, while I had not at all decided that I was going to skip 4 3 2 1, I did put it off.
And then, when Auster died a few months ago, I felt this pang of guilt, as though I had betrayed a writer I loved. So off the shelves it came, the dust was blown off the top, and I started reading it.
I haven't finished...I am on p. 452...but I am certainly enjoying and admiring it. I was right that for a novel by Auster, it was not very Austerian. The prose, I would say, does not sound like his usual prose at all, with long, detail-accumulating sentences that even slip into garrulity at times. The sheer piling up of detail has to do, I suspect, with another way in which this novel is a departure for Auster: it seems to draw deeply on memories of his childhood, boyhood, and youth.
Once I noticed how much of the novel feels like remembered detail, it struck me as remarkable and surprising that a novelist as prolific as Auster (4 3 2 1 was his 17th published novel, if you count New York Trilogy as three) had never before written fiction about growing up as a baby boomer in suburban New Jersey. Even his memoir, Hand to Mouth, opens with his finishing college and trying to make a career as a writer. But 4 3 2 1 is all about Archie Ferguson, who is born in 1947 to a middle-class Jewish couple that eventually separates, grows up in New Jersey with frequent visits to New York City, and comes of age during the expansive and turbulent 1960s. As far as the bare bones of his biography go, Archie Ferguson has a great deal in common with Paul Auster, born in the same place at the same time to a highly similar family.
Thus 4 3 2 1 has become the first Auster novel to remind me of the work of that other Jewish-American novelist who grew up in northern New Jersey, the one born 14 years before Auster and much more widely known. Philip Roth fictionally re-jiggered his boyhood and youth repeatedly. Besides the characters like Neil Klugman, Nathan Marx, Gabe Wallach, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, and Marcus Messner, who all seem to embody aspects of Roth himself, we have Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, and the "Philip" of The Plot Against America, all born in 1933 and raised in Newark in families like Roth's own. Not exactly like Roth's own, of course--there is always some juggling and rearranging, such as Nathan Zuckerman's having a younger brother while Roth himself had only an older brother. But consider the number of Weequahic High alums in Roth's fiction. The Weequahic neighborhood is almost Roth;'s Yoknapatawpha.
Auster had avoided drawing on this material his whole career, then towards the end of his career opened the floodgates--which I suspect is why the sentences in 4 3 2 1 got so long and so loaded with specifics. Auster had been saving them up his whole writing life and finally gave himself permission to use them. Take this relatively short sample, on Archie's typewriter: "How he came to love that writing machine, and how good it felt to press his fingers against the round, concave keys and watch the letters fly up on their steel prongs and strike the paper, the letters moving right as the carriage moved left, and then the ding of the bell and the sound of the cogs engaging to drop him down to the next line as black word followed black word to the bottom of the page." And that's just about typing. Auster really lets himself go when writing about playing basketball, or taking the train into the city, or watching old Laurel and Hardy films. 4 3 2 1 is the big old 19th century David Copperfield bildungsroman he never before let himself write.
But I haven't even mentioned the biggest surprise--that the novel gives us not just one Archie Ferguson, but four. That will need its own post.
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