This is the blurb:
Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.
As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvellous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
Review from The Guardian
One of several things Paul Auster shares with the protagonist of his new novel is an admiration for the 18th-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist, whose work (we know from Auster’s letters to JM Coetzee, published in 2013) “overwhelmed” Auster when he reread it seven years ago. “He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it,” observes the hero of 4321, which might have been written to defy that boring old advice yet ends up confirming its wisdom.
A Bildungsroman, it lays out four parallel lives of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born of Russian-Jewish descent in New Jersey in 1947. An early chapter ends after an uncle burgles his father’s white goods store; the next chapter rewinds the narrative, with the store burned down, not robbed. Auster replays it a third time – the store burns down with Ferguson’s father inside – before a final alternative shows the business thriving.
We’re lured in by Auster’s fine-grained scene-setting and intrigue at his intentions. The perspective is puzzling: we’re inside the protagonist’s mind but also told of what he was “still too young at that point to understand”. We’re curious, too, as to what Auster means when he says Ferguson’s parents appear “in the all-inclusive, authorised edition of The Book of Terrestrial Life”, a strange-sounding work that remains mysterious when it appears for the fifth and final time some 700 pages later.
By that time, 4321 has long settled into a largely unsurprising coming-of-age tale of sexual longing and literary ambition. Auster gives us heft without density: there are few stakes in this Borgesian garden of forking paths. The hero might sleep with Amy Schneiderman or Brian Mischevski; go to Columbia or Princeton; become a basketball reporter or a movie critic; get killed in a road accident or only maimed, but the story lines cancel each other out instead of adding substance.
The sentences, plausibly inspired by what Auster has called Kleist’s “great hatchet-blows of thought”, usually run about half the length of this review and often a good deal longer. But Kleist’s model sits ill with Auster’s preoccupations. Where Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas “tells and tells” us about its hero’s bloody rampage, 4321 tells and tells us about Ferguson’s first taste of couscous or about how good he is at “parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists”. You can fill 864 pages pretty quickly writing like this.
While there’s an everyman tint to Ferguson, Auster is keen to show how special he is, whatever the incarnation. A girl from Brussels with “breasts fuller than might have been expected” tells him he knows “10 times more than any 10 of these idiot Americans put together” when he brings up Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo (guess what the girl does next?). The “finest literary mind in Princeton” says it’s “a privilege” to meet him after reading his student short stories. When a prostitute says he’s “a good-looking boy with a pretty pecker”, there’s no question she doesn’t mean it.
As the last Ferguson standing makes it into the Nixon era, the novel’s girth guarantees suspense: how will Auster play the hand he’s spent so long assembling? That the novel should hymn the power of imagination is hardly a shock – he’s been here before – but in a book that is longer than his last three novels put together, the finale has the air of a bad joke. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse that he seems utterly sincere.What I thought: The critics seem to have been very harsh on Paul Auster. I chose to listen to this novel on Audible. All 35 hours of it. There was good and bad in this decision. Paul Auster's reading was easy to listen to and for the most part held my concentration. However it took a while for the penny to drop when a particular section would be announced as "blank" because that incarnation of the young man Archie had died in a previous section. For this a hard copy of the book was necessary, which I had in fact bought. It is a fat tome and took, I believe, over 5 years to write. Would I recommend it to my fellow readers. Probably not unless you have loads of time to read, leg in plaster and up in traction (?!) and want something sustained to get your teeth into!
Daily Telegraph: "Paul Auster's new novel, 4321, is as big as his ego – review
Los Angeles Times: " For a doorstopper, Paul Auster's '4 3 2 1' is surprisingly light"
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