His best work is spare, structurally interesting, enigmatic and darkly comic, with characters serving mostly as variables in a series of gently intellectual puzzles.

Auster has never been interested in psychological realism. Events in 4321 never drastically alter the personality of any character, and in any case personality is always, in this book, subservient to circumstance.Īnd that’s perfectly fine. 2 dies young, the victim of a falling tree branch we’re forced to flip past his blank chapter headings for the rest of the novel.) The timelines all cover the same twenty years (roughly, the 1950s and 1960s) and many of the same locales in New York and New Jersey. There’s a snobbish Aunt Mildred, a trio of unscrupulous uncles and a girl called Amy, who is sometimes Archie’s sweetheart, sometimes his friend and sometimes his stepsister.Īt first, this is all very difficult to keep track of, not because of any complexity in the book’s plot, but because, with a few exceptions, almost any event from one timeline could easily be transplanted into another without disrupting the narrative. Many of the novel’s characters are common to multiple timelines: Stanley always runs a furniture store, and Rose is usually some kind of photographer. Each subchapter develops one possible future life for Ferguson: chapter 1.1 is on the same track as 2.1 and 3.1 1.2 gives way to 2.2, then 3.2 and so on. From there on, the book is divided into eight long chapters, and each chapter into four interleaved subchapters. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson.

’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life.

4321 paul auster review