4321 (Auster) - Book Reviews

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