Books January 30, 2017 Issue

Paul Auster’s Novel

of Chance
In “4 3 2 1,” one man’s life unfolds along four
diverging narrative arcs.
By Laura Miller

ccording to a currently popular line of philosophy, a self is merely the

A sum of all the stories we tell about a particular human body. It’s an idea
that resonates through the work of the writer Paul Auster, in whose !ction
both selves and stories are precarious constructions, fascinating but unstable,
more illusion than reality. In “4 3 2 1” (Holt), Auster’s !rst 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. “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. “4 3 2 1” is indeed a doorstop of
forking paths.

All 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. Archie’s father, Stanley, at
!rst adores his young bride, Rose, but as the novel’s four plots diverge after
Archie’s birth, in 1947, the marriage survives in only one of them. Archie
himself doesn’t make it past Chapter 2 in one version of his story, killed when
lightning shears off a branch as the boy romps beneath the trees at summer
camp.

Sudden death has been a preoccupation of Auster’s since his own summer-
camp days. At the age of fourteen, while hiking during a storm, he was part of
a line of boys crawling under barbed wire when lightning struck the fence,
killing the boy in front of him. Chance, understandably, became a recurring
theme in his !ction, and in “4 3 2 1” it contributes to the four distinct paths of
Archie’s life. So, too, does character. In one story line, his father’s furniture
store burns down, his father collects the insurance for it, and life goes on
relatively undisturbed. In another, Stanley’s brother confesses that he’s run up
big gambling debts that can be paid off only if Stanley allows an arsonist to
burn down the store. Stanley waits in the building to thwart this plan but falls
asleep and dies in the !re. In yet another, Stanley’s warehouse is burglarized,
but he refuses to !le an insurance claim, because he knows that an
investigation will reveal that his other brother was behind the crime. In the
fourth, Stanley ends up a rich man after ejecting both of his ne’er-do-well
brothers from the business long before they can cause any serious trouble. As a
result, one Archie—let’s call him the Manhattan variation—grows up
fatherless, and clings !ercely to his mother when the two move to the city.
The Montclair variation grows up in straitened circumstances but with an
intact family. The Maplewood Archie lives in bourgeois affluence as his father
becomes obsessed with money and his parents become increasingly estranged.

Auster’s novels tend to fall into two categories, Paris and New York, a division
of tone, style, and ambition rather than of setting—paradoxically, some of his
most Parisian !ction takes place in New York City. He remains best known
for the three short novels that make up “The New York Trilogy”: exemplars of
his Parisian mode, they were !rst published in the nineteen-eighties and are
the foundation for a career far more celebrated in Europe than in his native
land. Descended from Kafka by way of Camus and Beckett, these books are
existential parables about the absurdity of the writer’s life, calling attention to
their own arti!ciality and grafted onto the apparatus of hardboiled detective
!ction. In “Ghosts,” a P.I. named Blue is hired to observe another man, named
Black, through the window of a neighboring apartment. After more than a
year of watching Black, Blue begins to suspect that it is he who has been the
target all along:

He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and
go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough
—to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through
words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were
an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. He could get
caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to
forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There is no story,
no plot, no action—nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and
writing a book.

In his New York mode, Auster pays tribute to what Rose Ferguson thinks of
as “dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal
Babel of human tongues.” The young characters in “4 3 2 1” worship the city
as only Jersey kids can; it is a manic paradise, visible but just out of reach. In
such novels as “The Brooklyn Follies” and “Sunset Park,” Auster’s evident
intention is Dickensian. He packs the books with minor characters of assorted
races and ages, and attempts to conjure up a jaunty urban cacophony.

That goal, however, is incompatible with Auster’s habitual style, which is a

top-down, summarizing narration that closes like a !st around the
proceedings. His novels are short on dramatic scenes and dialogue, and it’s not
easy to celebrate a polyglot metropolis when you’re unaccustomed to letting
characters speak for themselves. Whoever is telling the story—whoever is
speaking, period—always sounds too much like Paul Auster. His prose, even
when impassioned, has a bland, synthesized quality, and in his Parisian mode
it has deliberately been boiled down to the bones; the ease with which this
style can be translated contributes to his popularity overseas. In “4 3 2 1,”
which is more of a New York novel despite the predictable meta!ctional twist
at the end, his sentences come tumbling out in multiple clauses, mimicking
the breathless rumination of his earnest, callow, fairly humorless and slightly
stuffy protagonists:

The fundamental quest both before and after his new life began
had always been a spiritual one, the dream of an enduring
connection, a reciprocal love between compatible souls, souls
endowed with bodies, of course, mercifully endowed with bodies,
but the soul came !rst, would always come !rst, and in spite of his
$irtations with Carol, Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and
Connie, he soon learned that none of these girls possessed the soul
he was looking for, and one by one he had lost interest in them
and allowed them to disappear from his heart.

Auster’s medium isn’t really sentences or paragraphs or scenes but narrative,

events shoehorned into a sequence that endows them with signi!cance: Blue
has been hired to watch Black, therefore Black must be doing something
worth watching. The narration in Auster’s novels typically dominates every
other element in a ferocious and doomed assertion that the world the book
describes is not ruled by happenstance. Maybe that’s what all storytelling is
meant to do: reassure its audience that a legible causality shapes our world and
our lives. The main character in the !rst novel of “The New York Trilogy,”
“City of Glass,” seeking comfort after the death of his child, loves mystery
novels because the world of such !ctions is “seething with possibilities, with
secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, however trivial, can
bear a connection to the story’s outcome, nothing must be overlooked.
Everything becomes essence.” Plots, especially the solution-hungry plots of
detective stories, give meaning to the $otsam and jetsam of lived experience.

One Archie Ferguson becomes a journalist, one a memoirist, one a novelist.

One boy plasters his room with John F. Kennedy paraphernalia; another !nds
politics “the dullest, deadliest, dreariest subject he could think of.” All three of
the adult Archies pine after a girl named Amy Schneiderman, but only one
becomes her boyfriend. Were it not for that romance, however, this Archie
wouldn’t have climbed into a car that crashes, thereby losing the thumb and
index !nger of his left hand. Without this disability, he would not have been
exempt from the draft, a spectre hovering over all the Archies as they come of
age in the nineteen-sixties. The dominion of chance becomes most explicit
when, in 1969, the Selective Service System institutes a draft lottery to
determine when eligible men will be compelled to serve: the Maplewood
Archie thinks of it as “a blind draw of numbers” that “would tell you whether
you were free or not free, whether you were going off to !ght or staying home,
whether you were going to prison or not going to prison, the whole shape of
your future life to be sculpted by the hands of General Pure Dumb Luck.”

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he opposite of luck is destiny, a predetermination dictated by genes or

T history or, if you’re going to be old-fashioned about it, God. The
Manhattan Archie deliberately sabotages his grade-point average when he
returns to school after his father’s death: “Within the narrow scope of
misdeeds he was capable of, he understood that the only way to answer the
question”—of God’s existence—“was to break his end of the bargain as often
as he could, to defy the injunction to follow the holy commandments and
then wait for God to do something bad to him, something nasty and personal
that would serve as a clear sign of intended retribution.” Like any storyteller’s
audience, he wants to be reassured that whatever happens, however bad it may
be, it is linked to whatever happened before by narrative causality.

But all three adult Archies soon abandon the unreliable consolations of faith
for more secular explanations. The Montclair Archie goes to Columbia (with
several characters from earlier Auster novels listed as his classmates) and
becomes a journalist. He is on hand to cover the 1968 student revolt but !nds
that “taking the journalist’s view of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike
joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass
monastery—removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to
whirl around you on all sides.” The Maplewood Archie goes to Princeton, his
writerly inclinations channelled into more esoteric literary work. (This story
line features some amusing excerpts that read like undercooked Calvino
pastiches.)

Instead of God, what directs the evolution of each Archie seems to be an

irreducible kernel of identity. Whatever his circumstances, he was always
meant to be a writer, and also to stand at the sidelines and observe while other
people !ght. This looks like a reversal of the approach Auster took in his
earlier work, in which a character, simply by changing his name, can be
transformed into another person; in which the self is provisional, a product of
!ction. Still, it’s possible to detect a consistent thrum of anxiety running from
those early works through “4 3 2 1.” Auster likes to explicate his own texts,
overtly stating his themes in the very books that embody them, but one rarely
acknowledged in$uence is the legacy of the Second World War. The cynical,
fatalistic hardboiled detective novel and !lm noir of the nineteen-forties and
!fties—popular genres that Auster has often invoked—murmured of the
suppressed memory of the war’s horrors, the trauma and doubt scrubbed out
of American triumphalism. The narrative imposed on the Second World War
was one of straightforward heroism, but Archie’s generation, like Auster’s,
faced a more ambiguous challenge: their refusal to !ght on moral grounds
could also be construed as cowardice, and often was by the very men whom, as
boys, they’d so admired for risking their lives to defeat Fascism. The antiwar
protests of the nineteen-sixties were, among other things, an effort to replace
one story—that the con$ict in Vietnam was a necessary bulwark against
Communism—with another: that the war was, as Archie puts it, “not just a
political blunder but an act of criminal madness.”

And yet the longing for that less complicated, more satisfying story persists.
Archie’s “sole ambition” is to “become the hero of his own life,” and both the
Montclair and the Maplewood Archies have a burnished aura of Boy Scout
rectitude that soon becomes tiresome. “If we have more money than we need,”
the Maplewood Archie tells his mother when she announces that the family is
moving to a bigger house, “then we should give it to someone who needs it
more than we do.” The New Jersey Archies are a pair of Goody Two-Shoes,
equipped with a full complement of twenty-!rst-century liberal attitudes
about gender, race, and class, whose primary failing is a disposition to love the
women in their lives too faithfully and too well. These Archies are so alike
that it’s difficult to remember which one you’re reading about at a given
moment without the aid of notes.

Not so the fatherless Manhattan Archie, whose experiments in divine

provocation evolve into such louche activities as visiting prostitutes,
shoplifting (to pay for the prostitutes), and a loveless affair with a young man
who picks him up at an art-house theatre during a screening of “Children of
Paradise.” Everything about the Manhattan Archie—his bisexuality, the
memoir he writes about how Laurel and Hardy comedies saved his life, the
reading program he embarks on in Paris under the tutelage of a chicly
enigmatic art historian—is vastly more interesting than the generic nineteen-
sixties intellectualism of his suburban alter egos. By far the most affecting
passage in “4 3 2 1” is a scene in which this version of Archie experiments,
disastrously, with taking money for sex. It also helps that the Manhattan
Archie has little curiosity about what he calls “current events,” thus sparing
the reader the newsreel-like interludes of potted history that are constantly
interjected into the two other story lines.
When the last Archie is left standing, he makes a resolution: “As for the Tet
Offensive in South Vietnam, as for Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, as for the
murder of Martin Luther King: Watch them as carefully as he could, take
them in as deeply as he could, but other than that, nothing. He wasn’t going to
!ght on the barricades, but he would cheer for the ones who did.” Then he
goes back to working on his novel. This isn’t, in fact, a material departure from
his earlier style of political engagement, which mostly consists of reading the
newspaper. It’s as if Auster had forgotten that he once drove a character mad
by forcing him to watch a man sitting alone in a room writing a book.

Sprawling, repetitive, occasionally splendid, and just as often exasperating, “4 3

2 1” is never quite dull, but it comes too close to tedium too often; there is no
good reason for this novel to be eight hundred and sixty-six pages long, or for
every Archie’s love of baseball and movies and French poetry to be
rhapsodized over, or for every major headline of the nineteen-!fties and
sixties to come under review. The spooky, metaphysical economy of Auster’s
!ction in its Parisian mode (“Oracle Night,” from 2003, is the best of his most
recent books), with its arresting, uncertain, and dislocated narratives, offers
more room to breathe, more space for the reader’s imagination to squeeze its
way in, more spurs to wonder. It is this sort of book the surviving Archie
seems to be writing at the end of “4 3 2 1,” when he observes that “as with all
the other things he had written in the past three years, he was turning out
roughly four pages for every page he kept.” That sounds like an excellent
policy. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the January 30, 2017, issue, with the
headline “Fork You.”

Laura Miller, the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in

Narnia,” is a books and culture columnist for Slate. Read more »

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