Paul Auster: The Brooklyn Follies

I was looking for a quiet place to die." This is the way The Brooklyn Follies begins.

Someone recommended Brooklyn as a quiet place in which Nathan, the man who is looking for a congenial place to wither away, might return. He hasn't been to Brooklyn in 56 years, "and I remembered nothing".

He is looking for a plain place, not showy, where he doesn't know anyone. "More than anything else, that was what I craved. A silent end to my sad and ridiculous life."

He has spent this life, or 31 years of it, commuting to his Manhattan office where he worked for an insurance company called Mid-Atlantic, Accident and Life.

Nathan has a horrible ex-wife and a snippy daughter Rachel, who he is so alienated from she may as well be his ex-daughter. "Alas, poor Rachel ... My only child has inhabited this earth for 29 years, and not once has she come up with an original remark."

Nathan's lung cancer is in remission. He may have another 20 years to live, or just a few months. However long he has, he has to fill in the time somehow.

So he falls in love — in an adolescent way — with a Puerto Rican waitress called Marina who works at the Cosmic Diner where he has his lunch. She is married, and half his age, but she is kind to Nathan and laughs at his jokes.

He has no expectation of any outcome greater than this. It is a folly of a sort; one that will have greater, and possibly catastrophic consequences for the waitress in the walk-on part in Nathan's last performance.

This is a minor folly, for Nathan at least, in the scheme of his project.

This he has given "a grandiose, somewhat pompous title, in order to delude myself into thinking that I was engaged in important work.

This is The Book of Human Folly, and in it I was planning to set down an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and chequered career as a man."

He has, of course, and this is rather the joke, not finished with being an idiot. He may have a chance to redeem himself, or rather, his life. We'll see.

The Book is incidental to what Nathan says is the real story of this book. This is supposed to be the story of Tom Wood, Nathan's nephew, a promising boy Nathan had lost touch with.

He finds him working in a bookshop run by a local eccentric. Tom has run to fat, he has obviously never achieved the heights of literary greatness predicted for him.

They pick up where they left off, talking books and the mysteries of the universe in a world where Bush is about to become President.

They are two men cast adrift from women and love and expectation. Until a little, silent girl turns up. This is Lucy, the daughter of Tom's wayward sister who has sent her away — to keep the girl safe from the religious nut she's hooked up with — to Brooklyn, to live with Tom.

At which point you think: aha. Redemption has entered the story. That's about right, and it is from this point that women enter a book that has been about the stories of men. There is a corresponding shift in tone; happiness has entered the plot.

Whether or not joy can win over human folly — and the political folly that will end here on September 11 — is the big question.

Alongside The Book of Human Folly, Auster has fashioned a parallel story which is by turns joyous and funny and just plain sad. And one which from almost any other author would be hokey. Which is not to say that Auster doesn't stray dangerously close — he does. But he is nothing if not the master of writing very close to that steep face, and part of the reward is watching him negotiate that precipice.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer
* Faber and Faber, $35