The Brooklyn Follies & Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I hadn’t meant to write these two reviews together. I hadn’t meant, necessarily, to read them back-to-back.
Paul Auster is, and always will be, one of my favorite authors. If there is such a thing as a defining literary moment in one’s life, reading The New York Trilogy was it for me. Though I’d read a considerable amount by then, I had never stumbled across an author who played with the language, created a mood and weaved stories around chance and wonder, all the while somehow grounding everything in a plausible reality. Books like The Music of Chance, Moon Palace and Leviathan remain some of my all-time favorites, and while he lost me for awhile with some other works, last years Oracle Night made it clear that my Auster was back. The Brooklyn Follies begins with Nathan Glass moving to Brooklyn. He says it’s to find a place to die, though as the novel goes on it is clear he’s looking to begin a new life. Through chance (an Auster staple) he comes across his nephew Tom, and through a variety of lovely sequences, reconnects with others in his family. If this book is more straightforward than some of his earlier works, it doesn’t make it less poignant and in a lot of ways, Auster is telling a more mainstream story here. It’s about a man rediscovering what’s important to him after a bout with cancer, a failed marriage and a falling out with his daughter. It’s about what people will really do when they are given a second chance. And it’s about hope. This hope, of course – because it’s an Auster book – is not laced with daisies and candy canes. It’s more of delayed trauma. That’s because, as it becomes clearer as you work towards the end of the book, that Auster has put specific dates into his chapters for a reason. The book starts around the Bush-Gore election of 2000 and ends in September 2001. (This same device of driving towards 9/11 was used in an even more dramatic way in Nelson DeMille’s Night Fall, by the way.) I will add that Auster’s politics – which seem to be identical to mine – sometimes get in the way of the plot. Hearing Glass tell his girlfriend to always vote Democrat and that George Bush is an evil idiot is nice, but it distracted from the story in an unnecessary way.
All that being said, The Brooklyn Follies is a great book, refreshing and rewarding. If it is not the dark, creepy tales Auster has shown us before, that’s okay too.
Rating: 8.5/10.0
After finishing The Brooklyn Follies, I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, not realizing that where Auster’s book ended, Foer’s began. The book is a story about Oskar Schell, a 9-year old whose father was killed on 9/11. Schell is a precocious, intelligent child and also one who has been crushed by his loss. He refers to his sadness as ‘heavy boots,’ and he wears them often. The story is also framed by Oskar’s grandparents – his grandfather, who left the family long before Oskar was born, lived through the horror of the Dresden bombing and has lost the power to speak. He is so terrified of emotional pain that he’s withdrawn, staying mute and needing to create “Nothing” spaces to exist in. His torment is brutal, and because he doesn’t speak (his hands are tattooed with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to make communication easier), he writes letters to his son from afar.
The book incorporates pictures that Oskar takes with his grandfather’s camera (passed onto him), many of which he snaps while investigating what he hopes is a clue to get him closer to his father, even in death. He discovers a key in a vase his father bought, and is determined to find the lock which it opens. Watching Oskar go through this exercise, and learn how to cope with his loss, and the horror of that day, is a hard thing to do. This is literally one of the sadder books I’ve ever read, but because it’s so emotionally connective, I enjoyed it immensely. Foer is a sickeningly talented writer (married to Nicole Krauss, another talent) and often he seems to be grinning while he writes, but he continues to be able to portray pain and sadness alongside humor in a distinct voice. This is a fantastic book.
Rating: 9.0/10.0