4 3 2 1

By Paul Auster

Faber, £20

Review by Brian Morton

QUANTUM strangeness suggests that when an event or phenomenon is observed, it splits into two or more potential outcomes, then each splits again along its own path, until “reality” (which really does need the scare quotes) becomes a shimmer of possibility rather than a fixed chronology. In the multiverse, there are infinite versions of you, leading different existences according not just to decisions taken but to the observation of others. Which means, in layman’s terms, that should you be leading the life of Riley, somewhere or other someone else is leading yours.

These are ideas that have fascinated Paul Auster for years, though he routinely denies being versed in the actual theory, or in the poststructuralist ideas of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida or other philosophers who have explored the relationship between our worlds and our words. In a sense, 4 3 2 1 isn’t a new Paul Auster book at all, but a vast complex of all of them, right from his prose debut The Invention Of Solitude through the genre-defining existential detective fiction of The New York Trilogy and the other twenty-some books that make up his work list. That isn’t necessarily a criticism, but it may be a warning to those – primarily his fellow-Americans – that if they didn’t warm to his earlier work, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll respond favourably to this oddly lightweight doorstep. Auster has always been more admired in Europe than in his native country. Americans don’t like being told that reality is a fiction, even though they live as if it were.

What’s new this time is that Auster has taken a single character – plainly a version of himself – but split his narrative into four distinct timelines and existences. Thus: we see Archie Ferguson go to college, and not; lose a father, and not; lose a father a different way; lose part of the hand that made him a baseball star; lose God; lose his virginity to Amy Schneiderman, and to a 20-year-old black prostitute; lose his life in August 1960, and live on as his alternate selves. These are hardly spoilers. There is such a wealth of detail across 866 pages (866!) that you’ll have forgotten long before you get to the relevant point. For navigation, Ferguson’s lives are insistently linked to public events, notably the Kennedy assassination (in one version, he pops his cherry that very night) but also the Vietnam war, and famous baseball games.

The result is not so much confusing as mildly estranging, a little akin to reading an unpublished draft by a tyro writer with a poor grasp of continuity. A literary academic aunt who turns up in successive chapters and in contrasting moods doesn’t so much seem like a handmaiden of the multiverse as a character so thinly registered one doesn’t really care what man she has in tow this time. Auster’s old vice of telling too much and telling not very much at all is constantly in evidence here, as is a queasy editorialising about the nature of fiction and the nature of reality: “Everyone had always told Ferguson that life resembled a book, a story that began on page 1 and pushed forward until the hero died on page 204 or 926, but now that the future he had imagined for himself was changing, his understanding of time was changing as well."

Ferguson the aspiring writer wants to create work that explores the boundary between the seen and the unseen, and we get page after page of potted plotlines, right up to the completion of Right, Left Or Straight Ahead, in which one Lazlo Flute comes to a crossroads and has to make a choice; inevitably he makes the wrong one and receives the apologies of his own creator when he is beaten up by thugs on the straight-ahead road; “my imagination runs away from me and I just can’t help myself”.

The more intriguing mystery is how a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey comes to have a name like Archibald Ferguson. This goes back to the ancestor Reznikoff – Russian ancestry, rather than Auster’s Polish descent, for some reason – who is told on the immigrant boat that the name won’t work in America and that he should call himself Rockefeller instead. When an immigration official starts to process the 19-year-old at Ellis Island, Reznikoff slaps his forehead and cries out in frustration that he has forgotten his new name (“Ikh hob fargessen”) and so enters the New World as Ichabod Ferguson. Much later, having dabbled with other identities, much as Auster was once Paul Benjamin and Paul Queen, Archie becomes AI Ferguson and even Isaac Ferguson. The separation of living self and writing self is clankingly underlined on several occasions, but the narrative never breaks through to any fresh revelation and one is left to pick potentially autobiographical nuggets out of the text. Some experiences, like living in France and translating French poetry, are straight out of Auster’s CV. Some aspects of sexuality may be or may not be. The problem, perhaps, is that a book much concerned with fantasy and with absent authority (missing fathers being a standard trope in Auster’s world), it is hard to tell how much of the author’s own fantasy life and his family romance is being rehearsed.

Is it a good read? It’s a very long read. Even a determined assault fails to deliver any particularly alienating wallop. One just wallows in the detail and with the reassurance that a character dead in one chapter will reappear in another, or that Ferguson will lose his virginity at least three times. Do we really care, though? Not much. Imagine Philip Roth crossed with The Thorn Birds and you’re there.