Hard-luck and fantasy are two Auster mainstays: unlucky Mets obsessors, down-and-out kids or dogs, mad statue-bombers, and hapless detectives populate novels in which their own individual misery is redeemed only by the story they ultimately eke out. The Brooklyn Follies, Auster's newest, is no exception to hard times. Nathan Glass, Follies's 59-year-old ex-husband, ex-cancer patient, and ex-life insurance salesmen opens "looking for a quiet place to die," and for lack of a better idea, returns to his place of birth, Brooklyn, "like some wounded dog" to do the deed. Once installed, he begins a suspiciously Austerian project, writing what he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he plans "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man."
Fun stuff, or at least funny stuff, but Auster's intro is one long red-herring; Glass returns, not to die, but do a lot more living. Jolted back into the world by his dead sister's son, the overeducated and overweight Tom Wood, also currently fleeing life in his own way—a failed dissertation, a failed cab-driving career, and current career as bookstore clerk—Glass and Auster gleefully jump back into the land of the exaggerated living. The rest of the world obligingly comes along: Wood's boss Harry Brightman, nee Harry Dunkel, book-dealing in lieu of a past career as a counterfeiting art-dealer, not so chastened that he won't eventually start scamming with books instead; also onboard, eventually, is most of Glass' neighborhood, comprised of a beautiful Brooklyn-symbolizing mom, an equally bewitching diner waitress and her vengeful, UPS truck-driving husband, and a tiny AIDS-cursed black transgendered drag-performer, known as Rufus or Tina, depending on the venue.
Glass also brings more than a few carpetbaggers with him to colonize Brooklyn for the cozier. First his daughter, incapable of coming up with "an original remark, with something absolutely and irreducibly her own," for which she is relegated to second-class character status; then Tom's sister Aurora, a former-porn starlet and all-around wild one now in the evil clutches of a religious maniac husband and, finally, her silent and country-talkin' 9-year-old girl, Lucy. They are all here, Brooklynites and non-, cause, we gather, "who bothers to publish biographies of the ordinary, the unsung, the workaday people we pass on the street and barely take the trouble to notice?"
Evidently, Auster does, or at least, he thinks he does. The "ordinary" people here are, it's true, ordinary in Paul Auster's sense of the word: their lives are beset with coincidences on all sides as they go from late-life and mid-life crises to the more interesting stuff of sperm-bank visits, Scarlet Letter forgeries, unlikely trips to Vermont that end in car trouble and still more unlikely love with a woman named Honey Chowder, "an impossible woman with an impossible name"; b-movie-talking style revenge, and the unraveling of long back stories with horrifying details of rape ("'This is the holy bone, the reverend said, holding the erection in his hand and wagging it in my face'") and lesbian redemption. "The great spectacle of human crookedness," writes Auster. "It keeps coming at you from all sides, and whether you like it or not, it's the most interesting show in town."
