An inner disconnect, or, as Auster’s infamous character from The New York Trilogy, the maniacal linguist, Professor Stillman, would no doubt argue, a breach between signifier and signified. This renaming upon arrival instills an element of inherent severance in the texture of the protagonist’s family.

The first chapter, 1.0, serves as a kind of genealogical account tracing the arrival in New York of the boys’ grandfather, a Russian Jewish immigrant by the name of Reznikoff, 4 notably on the first day of the twentieth century – a date which underscores the fabular dimension to the book – and ends with the birth of the protagonist(s) in a similarly inflated tone: “and for several seconds after he emerged from his mother’s body, he was the youngest human being on the face of the earth.” 5ģThe Ferguson name was given at Ellis Island on the basis of a comic misunderstanding. They trace the development from birth to early adulthood 3 of four boys bearing the same DNA and name, Archie Ferguson. 5 Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1, London: Faber, 2017, 29.Ģ 4 3 2 1 is a modular book with four parallel stories divided into seven chronologically organized cycles.4 No doubt with reference to one of Auster’s influential precursors, the poet Charles Reznikoff.3 Except number Two who perishes in a storm as a child.Because, without the closeness you can’t be moved, and without the distance you can’t be amazed.” 2 4 3 2 1 does both, playfully, skillfully, and takes us beyond the literary paradigms of the twentieth century. It turns, rather, on ontological instability and introduces a composite mode of writing that eminently captures one of Auster’s favourite dictums about art – “to combine the closeness of the everyday with the distance of myth.

The opening line inscribes the inflated tone of the fabular which then recurs at intervals in an otherwise fairly straightforward semblance of the grand narrative as a reminder of the fact that this text does not conform to standard expectations of the novel. The story is embedded in a new type of heterogeneous narrative that, in some respects, embodies the complexity of adolescent life in urban America of the nineteen fifties to seventies. Siegumfeldt, A Life in Words, New York: (.)ġ“According to family legend…” So begins Paul Auster’s latest novel, the titan bildungsroman, 4 3 2 1, which tells a strangely counterfactual story in which four young people live different versions of the same life.

Auster 4 3 2 1