I’m finding it difficult to summarize Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies. It is the story of Nathan Glass, a retired life insurance salesman in remission from cancer, who moves to Brooklyn with the intention of dying in peace. He is reunited with his nephew, a failed academic working in a bookstore, Tom Wood, and through him introduced to a number of characters who drift in and out of their lives and, ultimately, offer the hope of a second chance. That’s really about as much as I can say without giving away too much of the plot. I’m averse to doing so because so much of the novel’s pleasures are derived from the revelations of plot and the paths it follows. The pace is languid, taking everyday circumstance and coincidence as major turning points. This all sounds like, I imagine, pretty standard fare, but Auster writes it so artfully, and so aware of the importance of details.

Life got in the way – two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don’t have the balls to stand up for ourselves – but I had never lost my interest in books. Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.

It seems that Nathan Glass is one of those annoying fictional characters who inherently knows everything, is incredibly self-aware, and, despite his cynicism and faults, is always right in his predictions. Rather, I think that Nathan’s age and variety of life experiences have shaped his ability to read, and yet at the same time be utterly surprised by, the follies of human nature. His authorial instincts allow him to recognize how the narrative of life is shaped by coincidences. It really celebrates is the power of the personal narrative in the arena of the political. The novel ends forty six minutes before the 2001 World Trade Center attacks in New York, with Nathan Glass announcing he is happy. The 2000 presidential election is mentioned, but these are merely background, context setting for the personal stories to take place against.

That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? A dream, a wild dream of removing ourselves from the cares and sorrows of this miserable world and creating a world of our own. A long shot, yes, but who’s to say it can’t happen?

The Brooklyn Follies is a ripping good yarn, and it almost pains me to not be able to pinpoint exactly what it is that made me enjoy it so much. As Nathan and the cast of characters are changed and shaped by what happens, The Brooklyn Follies serves as a reminder that life doesn’t end until death, no matter how old you are, how hopeless, how distanced, there is always the possibility of change.