Book: Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
Rating: 4/10 … more sentimental than chick lit
This book should win Auster new admirers wrote the Sunday Telegraph on the jacket of my paperback copy. Faint praise indeed from the anonymous author, but more than this travesty deserves. I discovered Auster when his New York Trilogy was first published about twenty years ago and delighted in a new and interesting voice in world literature. Since then, sadly, the quality of his works has been very mixed, with none scaling the heady summits of The City of Glass. The recent Travels in the Scriptorium was a decent if imperfect effort. Not so this folly.
This one is told in the first person by Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman. The quality of the writing is about what I’d expect from an insurance salesman. Auster often packs his books with stories and this one is no exception. However, these tales are implausible, sentimental twaddle for the most part. The characters are among the cheesiest I’ve met. I shouldn’t have persevered to the end but I felt I owed it to Auster for his better work. Who knows? Maybe it was a big joke and the punchline would be revealed on the last page. Wrooong!! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the last page arrived:
It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.
There wasn’t a dry seat in the house! Sorry Paul, I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient, but when a publisher is screaming for the next book, don’t let him have it unless it’s really ready.
