BOOK - Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies"

Paul Auster's tenth book, "The Brooklyn Follies," rolls out all the usual Austerian tricks—you really can't teach an old dog new ones—but those tricks have never felt so funny or lucid before. Don't let the ominous opening ("I was looking for a quiet place to die") fool you; the whole novel is a joke, and the punch line ("Someone recommended Brooklyn") is a long and happy life. It's that ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Auster's protagonist-by-proxy is Nathan Glass, a former life-insurance salesman, who, like all of Auster's characters, starts off totally alone. While Auster is a master of solipsism, he quickly surrounds Glass with a handful of interesting characters, including his nephew, Tom Glass, and his grandniece, a precocious and peculiar nine-and-a-half-year-old named Lucy. That's the whole brilliant plot: a man lives his life, and interesting things happen. There's no overall mystery, no bad guy or obstacle, so the novel is completely unpredictable, as if each moment has been left to chance. In Auster's educated yet simple prose, this is more human than highbrow—a character study, filled with quirky anecdotes and short stories. Don't misunderstand: "The Brooklyn Follies" works as a novel, too, it just doesn't rely upon cheap suspense to keep the audience reading.

Instead of plot, Auster fixates on character: swift, sharp descriptions, believable dialogue, and all the nuances of subtext in their actions. The only sure thing is their eccentricity and roguish behavior. Nathan Glass is the only straight man, the rest are filled to the brim with stories that he leaks with the skill of a master pourer. They are told as succinct summaries, covering a whole life in a couple of pages, but every page is rich with entertaining history, everything from Harry Brightman's scheme to sell a forgery of "The Scarlet Letter" to Aurora's conversion from stripper to cultist.

If this seems like rambling, it's actually quite meticulously swept up by Auster's electric prose. He writes in an ever-widening spiral, beginning at the solitary center, and then circling out in swift swoops until his narrative has encompassed the entire fantastic world. Nor does Auster shy from the mundane: he just wraps it up in his storytelling and makes it beautiful too. Take for example Tom's description of "the indelible moments of grace" he found working as a cabbie: "Gliding through Times Square at three-thirty in the morning, all the traffic is gone, and suddenly you're alone in the center of the world, with neon raining down on you from every corner of the sky." Even as he continues by saying, "you have to pay for it," this "moment or two of genuine, unqualified bliss," Auster is illustrating the opposite: a book of pure bliss, a book where the pages practically turn themselves.

Even Auster’s well-known philosophical asides come across as glossy entertainment. Discourses on Chaplin's "Modern Times" or on letters that Kafka wrote to a girl "from" her missing doll fit perfectly into this well-constructed world, and Auster continues with the story without missing a beat. One exception is a chapter written as a play (replete with a meta-fictional disclaimer) that is perhaps too obvious a discussion of the book's theme (all of Auster’s books, really): a search for the "Hotel Existence," our mind's perception of perfect happiness. But even here, the intellectual conversation is in such vernacular everyman that it's still compulsively readable.

"The Brooklyn Follies,” a perfection of the pseudo-novel that Auster
has been working on since "The New York Trilogy," is a delight to read, full of real wit and character, along with unpredictable events and surprising stories. It’s not what you expect—and that’s half the fun.