Borough of Chrome & Cream Cheese
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
More famous in France and Germany than in the United States, Paul Auster remains, first and foremost, a New York City writer, a Brooklyn writer in particular.
In a 2002 New York Times op-ed piece, Mr. Auster called New York “the true heartland” of the country; he noted that throughout his nationwide tour with NPR’s “National Story Project,” “the only city that anyone ever wanted to talk about was New York.” Mr. Auster’s own fiction retails a particular version of New York, and especially of Brooklyn, that appeals to readers outside of the city.
To be sure, his engagement with the city is thoughtful; in “Gotham Handbook,” written for impersonation artist Sophie Calle and found in the recently issued “Collected Prose” (Picador, 512 pages, $17), Mr. Auster writes, “The more we insist on [the things that bring us together] in our dealings with strangers, the better morale in the city will be.” These are the stubborn words of an attentive city dweller.
Mr. Auster’s new novel, “The Brooklyn Follies” (Henry Holt, 306 pages, $24), takes Mr.Auster’s own Park Slope for its setting. Moving to the neighborhood for his retirement, the protagonist, Nathan Glass, reports that:
I discovered that Brooklynites are less reluctant to talk to strangers than any tribe I had previously encountered. They butt into one another’s business at will (old women scolding young mothers for not dressing their children warmly enough, passersby snapping at dog walkers for yanking too hard on the leash); they argue like deranged four-year-olds over disputed parking spaces; they zip out dazzling one-liners as a matter of course.
Glass functions for Mr. Auster as an amplifier, a zesty old man who can get away with a certain amount of pro-Brooklyn corniness. His harmless stereotypes belong to the same post-authentic era that produces “Fuhgeddaboutit” highway signs. As always, Mr. Auster gives exact intersections, and in this book includes several real Park Slope establishments (La Bagel Delight, the New Purity Diner) that reinforce a chrome-and-cream-cheese sensibility.
Brooklyn, perhaps because it is contained in a larger metropolitan unit, seems content to fantasize about itself, an arrangement that has bolstered Mr. Auster’s riddling imagination. Little has changed, for Mr. Auster, since the 1990 mise-en-scene captured in his screenplay for “Smoke.” Indeed, Harvey Keitel could play Nathan Glass. The wave of hipsters that defines Park Slope today are nowhere to be seen.
Contrast Mr. Auster’s contemporary Brooklyn with the noir landscape of “The New York Trilogy,” the deconstructed detective novels that made Mr. Auster’s reputation. Those stories, set around Central Park and Brooklyn Heights, played on the fungible identities of single men.
If you have nothing better to do, Mr. Auster supposed, you might pick up the phone and answer to a name that is not your own; you might begin to pretend you are a character in a detective novel. The recently reissued graphic novel “City of Glass” (Picador, 144 pages, $14), the first book in the “Trilogy,” actually replaces the Tintin-like hero with a Dick Tracy caricature.
In his work since the “Trilogy,” Mr. Auster has enlarged his archetypal story. After losing a woman and a child, a man sinks into a funk, gets mixed up in some literary hall of mirrors, and emerges revivified. Nathan Glass speaks in Mr. Auster’s usual register when he says of his nephew, the grad school dropout who eventually makes good, that “everything changed for him.”
At end of Mr. Auster’s memoir of youth, “Hand to Mouth” – also in the “Collected Prose” – he says the same thing.After divorce, after hitting financial rock bottom, he writes, “I moved back to New York and kept on writing. Eventually, I fell in love and married again. In the course of those four years, everything changed for me.”
As his endings have gotten happier, Mr. Auster has traded noir grit for Brooklyn grit. He makes the absurd seem wonderfully old-fashioned – like the surprise ending of some cinema classic. This is not to say that Mr. Auster has given up experimental fiction and become more realistic. Nothing that happens in “The Brooklyn Follies” is believable, exactly.
Nathan Glass believes in rascals and chance, and for him Brooklyn is a magical field where those two things flourish. There are passages when the magic becomes rote: Glass will tell us about rather than re-create for us a “verbal sparring match,” he will tell us that a confrontation with a religious fanatic becomes “far more complex, far more human,” without showing much interest in outlining that complexity.
Still, Mr. Auster possesses a masculine storytelling wit; his sentiments for Brooklyn tend to embody themselves in tough characters; he is never schmaltzy. “The Brooklyn Follies” can read as light entertainment, but that would be an underestimation: It gathers Brooklyn’s prevailing tropes into a meaningful, exportable story.