4321 (Auster)

4321 
Paul Auster, 2017
Henry Holt & Company
800 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627794466


Summary
Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece.

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born.

From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.

Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other.

Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on.

As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 3, 1947
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning. Those modes can be found in The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and most recently 4321 (2017). Auster's books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Early life
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents of Polish descent: Queenie (nee Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He grew up in Newark and South Orange and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, all in New Jersey.

Career
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris where he earned a living translating French literature. After returning to the U.S. in 1974, he began to publish poems, essays, and eventually novels of his own, as well as continuing to translate French writers, such as Stephane Mallarme and Joseph Joubert.

Following his well regarded debut, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude (1982), Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). Instead of conventional detective stories organized around a mystery, Auster takes on existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature. In the process, he creates his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernism) form. Comparing the two works, Auster said,

I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, [Manhattan] Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance, 1990) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (Moon Palace, 1989; The Book of Illusions, 2002).

Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. His more recent works—Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the novella Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), and 4321 (2017)—have been met with critical acclaim.

Work with PEN
In addition to being a PEN-Faulkner winner, Auster served on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees, from 2004-2009, and as Vice President from 2005-2007.

In a 2012 interview, Auster announced his refusal to visit Turkey in protest over the country's treatment of journalists. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan retorted: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?" Auster then pointed out that...

According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world.

Reception
In a 2003 Washington Post article, Michael Dirda, French critical theorist, praised Auster's "limpid, confessional style," and his penchant for placing his heroes in a world of...

...mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots...keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

In a 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books, Dirda wrote that Auster had "established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."

James Wood of The New Yorker, has been less effusive in his praise for Auster. In a 2009 issue of the magazine, Wood wrote:

Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves.... Because nothing is persuasively assembled...one [is left] largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.)

Cultural historian Morris Berman believes that while Americans concern themselves with Auster's literary qualities, Europeans find his view of American society far more stirring:

[T]he theme of Paul Auster’s novels is that American society is incoherent, that it lacks a true identity.... [B]y and large Americans don’t...don’t read him. [But] Auster is tremendously popular in Europe, he’s been translated into more than twenty languages: those are the bulk of his sales. Americans are not interested in this kind of perception.

Personal life
Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster. In 1981, he married writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), and the two live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.

Recognition
Auster has won more than 20 literary awards, prizes, and honors from the U.S. (8), Ireland (8), France (4), Spain (2), and Belgium (1). Included among them are film awards, his election to the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a fellowship, and an honorary doctorate. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/7/2017.)

Book Reviews
An epic bildungsroman.... Original and complex.... A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.
Tom Perrotta - New York Times Book Review


A multitiered examination of the implications of fate...in which the structure of the book reminds us of its own conditionality.... A signifier of both possibility and its limitations.
Washington Post


At the heart of this novel is a provocative question: What would have happened if your life hadtaken a different turn at a critical moment?... Ingenious.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Auster presents four lovingly detailed portrayals ofthe intensity of youth – of awkwardness and frustration, but also of passion forbooks, films, sport, politics and sex.... [Trying] to think of comparisons [to the novel]...[nothing] is exactly right.... What he is driving at is not only the role of contingency and the unexpected, but the "what-ifs" that haunt us, the imaginary lives we hold in our minds that run parallel to our actual existence
Guardian (UK)


Draws the reader in fromthe very first sentence and does not let go until the very end.... An absorbing, detailed account – four accounts!—of growing up in the decades following World War II.... Auster’sprose is never less than arresting.... In addition to being a bildungsroman, 4321 is a “künstlerroman,” a portrait of the artist as a young man whose literary ambition is evident even in childhood.... I emerged from...this prodigious book eager for more.
San Francisco Chronicle


Leaves readers feeling they know every minute detail of [Ferguson’s] inner life, as if they were lifelong companions and daily confidants.... It’s like an epic game of MASH: Will Ferguson grow up in Montclair or Manhattan? Excel in baseball or basketball? Date girls or love boys too? Live or die?... A detailed landscape...for readers who like taking the scenic route.
Time


Auster pays tribute to what Rose Ferguson thinks of as a "dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues."... Sprawling...occasionally splendid.
New Yorker


A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read.... An incredibly moving, true journey.
NPR


Almost everything about Auster’s new novel is big. The sentences are long and sinuous; the paragraphs are huge, often running more than a page; and the book comes in at nearly 900 pages. In its telling, however, the book is far from epic, though it is satisfyingly rich in detail.
Publishers Weekly


Like life itself, fiction is full of endless possibilities, something the multi-award-winning Auster exploits to the fullest in his new work.... Archibald Isaac Ferguson['s]...life splinters off into four different yet parallel paths, with each path offering widely swinging variations.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Auster has been turning readers’ heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling.... He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date...[a] ravishing opus.
Booklist


Auster, as he often does, has something more complex in mind. Indeed, his subject in these pages is identity: not how it gets fixed but rather all the ways it can unfurl.... With this novel, Auster reminds us that not just life, but also narrative is always conditional, that it only appears inevitable after the fact
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for 4321...and then take off on your own:

1. Of the three (longer) lives of Archibald Ferguson—a journalist, a memoirist, a novelist—which do you prefer? Which engaged you more, which has a perferable outcome in your estimation?

2. To what degree, in terms of an irreducible identity, are the Archies similar? Are they sometimes too similar, making it hard to distinguish one life from another? Or do you find each Archid distinct from the other?

3. Archie's "sole ambition" is to "become the hero of his own life." Does he achieve this goal in any of his incarnations? What does that ambition say about someone?

4. Talk about the role of chance in Archie's lives. To what degree does accident, as opposed to fate or a sense of inevitablity, determine his various lives—and, by implication, our own lives. Consider, for instance, his belief that the 1969 draft lottery was "a blind draw of numbers that would determine "whether your were free or ot free." And that the "whole shape of your future life [was] to be scrlpted by the hands of General Pure Dumb Luck." Where else does chance come determine the shape of life.

5. Follow-up to Question 4: Consider, also, the Manhattan Archie who deliberately sabotages his own class standing in a desire to upend any plans that God might have for him. Where do you stand on the issue of self-determination, action, or God's will?

6. What about Amy Schneiderman and her varous incarnations? She and Archie have a romantic attachment in only one of the lives, and yet he pines for her in the others. What is Amy's powerful draw for Archie?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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