The Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007I recently read The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. I heard a many people rave about Paul Auster in grad school, but I hadn’t read any of his work myself until my Oregonian friend lent me this new novel. My Oregonian friend reads more than anyone I have met - even anyone I met while in grad school studying English literature! When she gave me the most recent stack to read, I picked what book to read first based on the opening. The Brooklyn Follies won hands down. The opening reads: “I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.” I started reading and couldn’t put it down. In the middle of reading it, I actually was on a red-eye and still couldn’t put it down. My intrigue of the plot development and love of the writing style kept the pages turning despite my sleep deprived body trying to “sleep” as much as is possible in economy. I have another Minnesotan friend who is a very talented story teller. Listening to her tell a story is intoxicating. Her writing is much of the same - but, alas, she is not a writer, or so she tries to tell me. When I stumbled across this passage in The Brooklyn Follies, I immediately thought of her, and me…….and all the rest of those out there with those creeping doubts that you cannot write.
The former graduate student and literary scholar cleared his throat and begged to differ with me. There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, an infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or influenza of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone at any time. The young and the old, the strong and the weak, the drunk and the sober, the sane and the insane. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would discover writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute–from the loftiest idealism to the most insidious corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and doctor, solders and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins. If no one could be excluded, what prevented an almost sixty-year-old ex-life insurance agent from joining their ranks? What law declared that Nathan Glass had not been infected by the disease?
I shrugged.
“Joyce wrote three novels,” Tom said. “Balzac wrote ninety. Does it make a difference to us now?”
“Not to me,” I said.
“Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?”
I love it. I love that once writers lure you into their world, they can convince the reader of anything. It’s like how I think I can sing when I listen to the Indigo Girls. But that’s another post. If you haven’t read Auster yet, pick something up. I am going out on a strong limb after some additional Auster internet searches, that you will be satisfied with many of his novels. If you are looking for a specific recommendation, pick up The Brooklyn Follies.