“4 3 2 1” is indeed a doorstop of forking paths.Īll four Archie Fergusons share the same origin story, one that has much in common with Auster’s: a paternal grandfather who arrives in the United States with a Jewish name, which gets converted to something more Gentile-friendly on Ellis Island a family history marred by murder an emotionally remote, entrepreneurial father a childhood in suburban New Jersey, a place that Archie, in all his incarnations, comes to detest. “Clearly you’ve read Borges by now,” the faculty adviser remarks to one of these iterations of Archie Ferguson, a character who, like most of Auster’s heroes, is fanatically bookish. In “4 3 2 1” (Holt), Auster’s first novel in seven years and, at eight hundred and sixty-six pages, the longest by far of any book he has published, a single man’s life unfolds along four narrative arcs, from birth to early adulthood. It’s an idea that resonates through the work of the writer Paul Auster, in whose fiction both selves and stories are precarious constructions, fascinating but unstable, more illusion than reality. Illustration by Sébastien PlassardĪccording to a currently popular line of philosophy, a self is merely the sum of all the stories we tell about a particular human body. Auster’s summarizing style of narration closes like a fist around the proceedings.
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