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| The Brooklyn Follies
Review by Harriet Parker-Bass
The Brooklyn Follies
by Paul Auster
Henry Holt & Co .
$24.00
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"I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn....". So begins the story of Nathan Glass. Nathan is 59 years old. His marriage has fallen apart, he is distanced from his daughter and he is in remission from cancer. As a project to keep himself busy while he is waiting, he decides to write an account of the blunders, idiocies and foibles of his life and the lives of people he knows. He gives this work the grandiose title of “The Book of Human Folly”. As it turns out, Nathan has very little time to write….he find himself in the middle of an exuberant borough surrounded by a fascinating cast of characters. Among them are Tom, Nathan’s estranged nephew, Tom’s silent nine year old niece who shows up on his doorstep, Tom’s boss, a flamboyant ex-con book dealer and a neighbor nicknamed the BPM…Beautiful Perfect Mother. What brings these people together is the very folly of which Nathan writes…. and their underlying need for love and companionship. As this story progresses, Nathan becomes inextricably entwined with these wacky characters. HIs life is enriched and his lost soul saved in the refuge known as Brooklyn. Don't think for a minute that this is a saccharine sweet book….it IS Paul Auster and there is a dark quirkiness to the story and the characters.
The literary references in this book are fabulous…..a delight for any booklover. The love of literature takes front and center in every conversation between Tom and his uncle. "Never underestimate the power of books," Nathan reminds us and Tom. This cuts straight to the theme of Auster's work: that the stories we tell one another are more than mere entertainments. Tom relays to Nathan a story of Kafka. Near the end of his life he sees a little girl crying in the park. The girl had lost her doll. Kafka assures the girl that the doll was not lost, but traveling. So everyday for three weeks Kafka shows up at the park with a letter from the doll which Kafka wrote. The little girl was no longer sad, Tom tells his uncle. She has the story. “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live in an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear.” We are lucky, if just for awhile, to live inside Auster’s stories.
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