4 3 2 1 • Paul Auster

After a long time, I finally picked up a contemporary book again and read something from this millennium—which doesn’t happen all that often. Paul Auster’s last novel, 4 3 2 1, was driven quite energetically through the book-blogger village in 2017, shortly after its publication. That alone usually isn’t enough to lure me out from behind the stove. But in this case I found the book’s concept very inventive and intriguing. Whether the read was worth it—or whether Auster once again drove me back into the arms of the splendid authors of past centuries—you’ll find out in this post.

4 3 2 1 is about Archie Ferguson, and the novel begins with Archie’s grandparents and parents and then goes on to describe his life—specifically his youth. However, and this is the special, imaginative twist: not in a single version, but in four different renditions. Four different ways Archie’s life could have unfolded; four different possibilities for how his path might develop—or did develop. Archie grows up in Newark, New Jersey, close to New York, and the novel spans the 1950s and 1960s.

Archie’s background—his parents and his origins as the grandson of a Jewish immigrant from Russia—is, of course, identical in all four versions. But then the four life paths branch off, and both his environment and Archie himself experience very different things; their lives are shaped by entirely different influences, strokes of fate, and changes. As readers, we always follow Archie from a narrator’s perspective: how he thinks and feels; how, through his eyes, we get to know the people around him—his parents, family, friends, and loves. These four versions of Archie’s life are not presented one after the other in isolation, but interwoven, arranged in temporal parallel. You always read a set of four chapters, alternating between the four narrative strands, which thus unfold in parallel time—but in different variants. With each chapter, the differences between the various Fergusons grow. It’s an interesting arrangement that, conceptually, recalls Bach’s fugues a little. Either you listen to the entire melody of the book and get a blurred composite image of all the individual Archies, or you try to isolate the four lives mentally and lose that abstract, overarching view of the protagonist. In truth, you can’t really do that, so the fugue comparison may be a bit off—you’re always spoon-fed a blended version of all four Archies. That, in part, is the book’s appeal. I liked this arrangement a lot.

I also really liked the setting—the Newark, New Jersey, and New York of the fifties and sixties. I’ve read very little about that period, so I found it exciting how Auster tells the very individual developments of the four variations while the political, social, and societal backdrop remains a constant, influencing Archie’s different traits in different ways. The events of the time—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the ’68 movement, student protests, race riots, the assassination of Kennedy—all the major political developments are, of course, constant, the same in every variant, and so the reader learns from different perspectives how these changes reverberated through society then. In one variation, Archie is intensely involved in the Newark uprisings; in another, in the protests at Columbia University.

I also loved how Auster develops Archie’s personality. His experiences—what he lives through, his social environment—shape his nature and character, and so he is a different person in each of the four versions. And yet, not entirely: his strengths and weaknesses are, in many respects, similar. Auster seems to balance what a person’s genes provide with what life experiences and other people’s influences bring. He does this quite well. Archie is always drawn to art, literature, and film, and in every variant he writes in some form. You can recognize the core of his personality in each of the stories, as different as he otherwise appears. Sports are always one of Archie’s passions, too, and Auster weaves that into the novel nicely—something secondary, yet something that drives, enriches, and interests Archie.

Overall, Auster focuses on Archie’s childhood and youth; the novel does not cover his entire life. I didn’t expect that at first. But youth—the feelings, uncertainties, the difficulties of growing up and finding oneself—is something Auster depicts very well. I found it convincing, and he communicates Archie’s internal conflicts at many points with great clarity. His characters felt consistently plausible and realistic to me—not only Archie, but also his parents and friends.

A key element of the novel lies in these four variations—something that really made me think: how much life depends on coincidence, on the people around us, and on politics. How many different ways one’s own life might have unfolded, and how these what-ifs belong to life just as much as what actually happened. There’s a hint of fatalism in that, but not entirely, because in every variation it’s also Archie’s own decisions that steer his life in different directions. The question that arises—the one everyone probably asks at some point—is what the different versions of one’s life might have looked like. And perhaps what didn’t happen is more present than we consciously perceive. This always makes me think of the infinity Nietzsche postulated: that in an infinite universe, anything with a probability greater than zero (no matter how small) will occur at some point—indeed, infinitely often. That would mean you live one possible version, but, assuming the universe is infinite, you will also experience all the other possible branches. From that perspective, Auster’s four developments are vanishingly few.

The book moved me again and again in places—especially its sense of youth, that everything-is-possible feeling. But on the whole, 4 3 2 1 didn’t excite me as much as other books that got under my skin. Archie still felt somehow too distant to me. On the one hand, the narrative mode—while offering good insight into Archie’s thoughts and feelings—often struck me as somewhat cool and detached. I didn’t truly root for the protagonist; no intense bond formed between me and Archie. On the other hand, I could identify with him only to a limited extent, and all four Archies had little in common with me, so my empathy was limited.

These interwoven strands—four variations that alternate in constant rotation—also disrupt the reading flow each time. I repeatedly found myself asking which version I was in and what had just happened before. That effect is likely intended to create precisely this blending, but it isn’t necessarily conducive to the reading experience. You do end up flipping back now and then to check what last happened in the given thread.

In terms of language, you can tell the sentences have been polished, and there are some very effective constructions—such as long, unending paragraphs when, for example, a character’s breathless litany of self-doubt is described. Or enumerations when Auster wants to capture different facets of a situation. Elsewhere, he prefaces sections with italicized keywords to characterize particular points. These are lovely, distinctive devices, but I still often found the phrasing less poetic and sonorous than I’d hoped—more straightforward. In that respect I expected more. When I think, for instance, of Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing, I was repeatedly blown away by the rhythm and melody of the language. There are passages like that in Auster’s book, too, but sadly far too few. I don’t want to withhold one such splendid sentence from you (though it isn’t complete—it goes much further; this is only the beginning):

“A white South African woman with the dark complexion of a North African, older, deeper roots in the deserts of the Middle East overlaid by Eastern European roots, the exotic Jewess of Germanic and Nordic literature, the gypsy girl from nineteenth-century operas and Technicolor films, Esmeralda, Bathsheba, and Desdemona in one, the black fire of her curled, unruly hair like a crown on her head, delicate-boned and narrow-hipped, slightly sloping shoulders and bent neck when she took notes in class, languid movements, never hectic or annoyed, calm, gentle and calm, not the Levantine seductress she seemed to be but a solid girl full of warmth, in many respects the most normal girl Ferguson had ever felt drawn to, […]”

p. 672

Paul Auster was born in Newark in 1947, has published numerous books, and is a fixture of American literature. He has also written poetry and essays, worked as a translator, and lived in France for a time. Reading Auster’s biography, it’s clear that this novel is highly autobiographical and that he has a great deal in common with Archie. His passion for sports, films, books; his birthplace; the fact that the ’50s and ’60s were also the years of his childhood and youth; that he too was deeply impressed by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; that he studied at Columbia University; Auster describes himself as just as shy as his Archie—and there are many more parallels. Considering that Auster published this book at nearly seventy, it’s more than a simple story. While reading, the book often felt like a retrospective, a recapitulation, with a constant hint of melancholy. Even at the beginning of a bright phase in Archie’s life—when something goes well—I always sensed transience, likely amplified by the narrative compression. Archie often seems far too reflective and wise for a teenage boy.

If you’d like to learn more about the background, about Paul Auster and this novel, I can recommend an excellent ARTE documentary that I watched right after finishing the book (note: the documentary contains many spoilers, so watch it only after reading). It makes clear, again, how strongly Archie is bound up with his creator. And Auster talks about how he writes, sharing a few behind-the-scenes insights. I always find that fascinating. You can also sense that Auster is a rather melancholic person—something I strongly felt in his book.

After watching the documentary—the interviews with him and with his wife—I also understood why the book didn’t fully grab me; why Archie, and thus Auster, didn’t come as close to me as a work of this scope should. His whole mindset, his way of thinking, his way of seeing and describing the world is that of an artist. Of course every book is art, and of course I’m drawn to many facets of it. But I’m also a child of ratio—wedded to a prosaic, pragmatic, unsentimental view of the world, at which a true artist would probably only shake his head. But so what—good! With books, we encounter all kinds of people: those we fall in love with from the first line, and those whose worldview differs from our own—and I enjoy that in every book.

The edition itself was named one of the most beautiful German books of 2017 by the Stiftung Buchkunst, and of course I got the hardcover. But I can’t quite follow the decision. I expected a truly splendid, lavishly produced novel, but I find the design rather ordinary and not particularly outstanding. So you can safely opt for the paperback, since the features praised by the Stiftung Buchkunst jury are present in the paperback as well.

I also find it interesting that it took four translators to bring the book into German. I found the answer in the FAZ review: the aim was apparently to publish the book in Germany at the same time as the original, and that wouldn’t have been feasible if only his regular translator, Werner Schmitz, had worked on it. According to the FAZ article, the translators weren’t each given a single Archie version, but worked according to their availability.

Conclusion: Auster’s expansive novel about four variations of Archie Ferguson’s life is a successful book that offers a very personal view of America in the fifties and sixties. Mapping out the different possibilities of one human life is an unusual and fascinating idea that Auster executes excellently. With its occasionally unconventional stylistic devices and the detailed attention to its many convincingly drawn characters, the novel entertained me consistently well. It didn’t utterly captivate me, though. I simply didn’t develop an intense bond with its protagonist, and I found too few sentences truly sonorous and poetic. Still, it’s undoubtedly a major achievement, and the novel’s autobiographical traits lend it great authenticity and depth. A novel well worth reading—one that stirred quite a few thoughts and feelings in me.

Book Information: 4 3 2 1 • Paul Auster • Rowohlt Buchverlag • 1264 pages • ISBN 9783498000974