Fiction: Nathan Glass, retired insurance salesman, failed husband, cancer survivor, begins his story with the candour that is to mark his entire tale: "I was looking for a quiet place to die."
It is a catchy opening line and an apt one for what is possibly the best novel Auster has written to date. Everyone likes an Everyman's story, and, true to Auster, a contemporary US writer with a magpie's mind and a fondness for the Dickensian yarn, this is an engaging, almost folksy story as complex as life - and twice as believable.
Ironies abound. Nathan may well have been looking for a place to punch in time before making his final farewells, but what he soon discovers on returning to his native Brooklyn - "I hadn't been back in 56 years, and I remembered nothing" - is a life, busy and bold and full of feeling.
New Jersey-born Auster began his career with the New York Trilogy, works which suggested he had far more in common with clever French intellectuals than sharp, punchy fellow New Jersey-born Jewish writers such as Philip Roth. Auster, it seemed, would be ever the victim of his determined, at times laboured, cleverness.
There is also his obsessive love of coincidences and bizarre shifts of fate - all very well if you are Charles Dickens, often irritatingly contrived if you are not. Yet at his best, as in books such as The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr Vertigo and the attractively sentimental Timbuktu, Auster can draw on warmth, offbeat humour, surreal flourishes, eccentric digressions, an instinctive, likeable tone and, above all, a devotion to story. The Brooklyn Follies, wise and touching, possesses each of these qualities in abundance.
The opening chapter, entitled "Overture", offers Nathan the narrator and central character a chance to win our trust and sympathy. And off he goes, taking the more-than-willing reader with him. Auster, who was born in 1947, is hardly - yet - the stuff of grand old men of letters, but in Nathan he has caught an appealingly world-weary sensibility that has seen much. Yet Nathan remains open to the many things that happen once he makes up his mind to face death quietly through writing a book about human follies, his own as well as errors made by others.
Good old Nathan, never one for sticking his chest out, is anxious not to be the star of his book and, lucky for him, he meets up by chance - chance is always vital in an Auster tale - with his nephew Tom Wood. Formerly a brilliant student, Tom is now fat, depressed, on the run from his academic failure and working in a book store. Within pages of them meeting up again, Auster treats us to a wonderful sequence featuring the reawakened student mind of Tom as he speaks quite brilliantly on the subject of Poe and Thoreau. It previews a wonderful, far fuller eulogy on the subject of great dead writers that occurs later in the narrative.
The dynamic between newly reunited uncle and nephew is vibrant and convincing. Both have been beaten by life, but Auster is alert to the distinctions; Nathan is reconciled, while Tom, so many years younger, is merely bewildered. "A few pointers after a lifetime of toiling in the trenches of experience," offers Nathan to his nephew when warning him of his employer Harry's criminal past, "con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why? . . . Because they're hungrier than we are. Because they know what they want. Because they believe in life more than we do." For all their rapport, which Auster establishes quickly and sustains well, the novel never falters into an easy double act. Through Tom, Nathan meets up with Harry Brightman, book store owner and erstwhile liar supreme, who has abandoned his criminal ways and is always ready to help his fellow man.
The circle of characters becomes wider, like so many ripples in a pond, and Auster keeps sight of them all. So much is going on in this book, so many different characters are all busy trying to make sense of their lives, and of themselves, that it is more like a 19th-century novel, albeit one written by the Coen brothers. Most of it works but, as always with Auster, there is always the danger of one sub-plot too many and he can find it hard to resist a final extra detail.
Something that works better than it could have is the sudden arrival of a nine-year-old girl who refuses to speak. She is Lucy, daughter of Tom's wayward sister, and therefore niece to Nathan who has been having his own problems with his grown-up daughter, Rachel, who gave up on Dad years ago.
Slowly but surely, Auster breathes life into Tom without neglecting his narrator. Tom's recalling of an incident in Kafka's life is beautifully handled. Throughout this surprising novel Auster produces extraordinary insights and achieves moments of clarity. Tom concludes his account of Kafka once helping a little girl accept the loss of her doll by writing a series of letters on behalf of the missing doll, by offering a telling observation: "For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists."
The Brooklyn Follies is humane and thoughtful, although it is as busy as the New York traffic, with more romantic complications than a Shakespearean comedy. Much of the narrative's impact rests on the sharpness of the dialogue. There are some terrific exchanges in this book; Auster conveys a real sense of people talking. Always strong, though, is Nathan, speaking with those around him and addressing us, his listeners, because this is a narrative which succeeds through being actively told. And Nathan does this. He is a narrator who thinks as much as he speaks. When he and Tom attempt to bring Lucy to unwilling relatives, the little girl has other ideas and acts accordingly.
Nathan considers his family through the eyes of others. "What a motley bunch of messed-up, floundering souls. What stunning examples of human imperfection. A father whose daughter wants nothing to do with him anymore. A brother who hasn't seen or heard from his sister in three years. And a little girl who's run away from home and refuses to speak." Near the close of what is a most readable tale told by the most approachable of narrators, it looks like old Nathan is about to die. Again, Auster thinks twice and what could have become mawkish is retrieved.
Politics runs through the narrative; it is a book about the US. Nathan takes his leave of us some "forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center." In Nathan Glass, Auster has created a man who knows what it is like to walk between life and death and who has learnt more than a few lessons along the way. So too has Paul Auster, in a novel that ably demonstrates how good he can be when he allows his instincts and humour to dispense with the clever in order to concentrate on the real.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Brooklyn Follies By Paul Auster, Faber, 304pp. £16.99
