Paul Fulcher's Reviews > 4 3 2 1

The bombardment of all these words, that ceaseless yammering which failed to make any distinction between important things and unimportant things, talk that could impress you with its intelligence and perspicacity or else half bore you to death with its utter meaninglessness.

Update 1: Inexplicably shortlisted for the Booker. I'm lost for words. If only Auster had been.....

Update 2: Awarded my worst completed book of 2017 (albeit The Nix may have been a contender had I got past page 70)

The above quote sums it up well - except for the intelligence and perspicacity part, as there was little of that on show.

There are two distinct elements to 4 3 2 1 - a (painfully) detailed account of someone growing up to be a writer; and a Sliding Doors style approach where different moments cause a life to go down different paths, set against a backdrop of a turbulent period of history (here 1960s America).

"As far as I know, no one has ever written a novel with this form,” Auster said in the Guardian. Except of course they have - and they have not only done it first, they have done it much much better.

Kate Atkinson's Life after Life / A God in Ruins and Jenny Erpenbeck's Alle Tage Abend (beautifully translated by Susan Bernofsky as The End of Days) managed the bifurcation of lives much more effectively, and gave far more insight into history that Auster's trotting out of events.

And Knausgård has written such a definitive account of a writer's life from birth onwards, that anything else becomes a lightweight imitation. If Auster's historical insights were uninspiring, I'm sure Auster does have many intelligent insights into the literature that he mentions throughout the story, but he seldom shares them with us here, often simply resorting to lists of books and authors.

To be fair (assuming Auster isn't ignorant of these works) putting the two elements together is new - but the result is a tedious 200-250 page novel largely repeated four times.

And Auster clearly sides on the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate, as despite various traumas Ferguson emerges as the same highly unpleasant character in each life version (his creepy forward-planned relationship with Celia, the 12yo sister of a recently killed friend, a particular lowpoint), and with the same oddly narrow worldview and ambition despite all the momentous events around him.

For books as elsewhere in life, length itself isn't an issue, its girth that matters. Some of the greatest novels of the 2000s weigh in much longer than this: 2666 (1126 pp), 1q84 (992pp), Your Face Tomorrow (1287pp), My Struggle (2818pp with the 1000+ volume 6 yet to come) and of course Ferrante's magnificent Neopolitan Quartet (1700 pp), but they each have depth, unique qualities, and, crucially, reading them each was pure pleasure. [Although as an aside, many of the authors choose - for their own and the reader's sanity, or in Bolano's case to maximise sales revenue - to publish them in instalments.]

Here the length is just padding. At one point we're told:

The three students who shared the apartment with them, for example fellow students named Melanie, Fred and Stu in the first year, Alice, Alex and Fred the second year, had no role to play in the story.

which rather begs the question of why mention them.

Ferguson.4, himself an author, notes at the end 'he was turning out roughly four pages for every one he kept - if only Auster had followed Ferguson.4's approach and kept only one Ferguson the novel may not have been improved, but at least it would have been mercifully shorter. And I would certainly recommend anyone still determined to read the book to pick one life (Ferguson.1 I would suggest) and read it through, skipping the other parts: if you like it then you can read the others.

Some other favourite quotes I noted while reading which really spoke to me:

Either you give in to your despair and wait for it to pass, or you burn your scarlet notebook and forget you ever had it.

Unfortunately the library might have objected if I followed the latter course, so I had to grin and bear it.

on some days he felt the book was trying to kill him. Every sentence was a struggle.

every day in fact.

Amy let out a prolonged groan and then tore in to him for wasting his time on trivial, asinine, college-boy humour.

I know how she felt.