Brooklyn Follies
April 9th 2007 03:35
Image: amazon.com
Writing out and categorising the extent of human folly is not for everyone, but for Nathan Glass, ex-insurance salesman, ex-husband and apparently ex-father, it seems that is all there is left to do. Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster is a poignantly funny look at humans and their consistently inevitable way of stuffing up!
After surviving a cancer scare, our hero finds himself drawn back to his old neighbourhood of Brooklyn to live out the rest of his sorry life. He is happy to be left alone to enjoy lunch at the Cosmic Diner where he can flirt with Marina the Puerto Rican waitress, stroll the streets of Brooklyn in blissful anonymity and spend his evenings building 'The Book of Human Folly'. But a chance meeting with his long lost nephew Tom, and the surprise appearance of Tom’s niece Lucy, brings Nathan’s family relations back into full swing. It is not what Nathan envisioned for his finally days, but there it is. One never out-runs their past, or their relatives!
I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s like watching a feel-good movie, with all the variations of characters blending into a circus of human folly. We meet Harry Brightman, a gay, rare book seller who can’t control his urge to con, a Jamaican transvestite (in love with Harry), a BPM (Beautiful Perfect Mother) who makes jewelry, and Honey Chowder, a loud, over-bearing school teacher with her eyes firmly set on Tom. The whole story is a comedy of errors that Nathan manages to wrangle into some kind of order which brings us to an indubitably happy ending.
I only found myself scoffing at one chapter – where Nathan’s niece Aurora makes her appearance. Unlike the rest of the book, this episode has a weak storyline and plot which momentarily brought the whole novel plummeting to mediocrity. Grant it, there are some crazy people with some crazy schemes throughout the book, but Aurora’s experiences are just too silly to even contemplate. Why Auster did not (or was not advised to) rewrite this chapter is a mystery to me, for it is the only blight on a great little book.
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