I grieved when the hero of Paul Auster's novel died on page 180—but especially so because this novel is almost 900 pages long. How would I manage without a protagonist through all those remaining chapters?
But wily Mr. Auster’s had a backup plan. In fact he had three backup plans. In the course of his wide-ranging historical novel 4-3-2-1 , he deploys four different versions of his main character Archie Ferguson, each one pursuing his own distinctive coming-of-age story. There’s a whole alternative universe surrounding each of these Archies. Mom and Dad may be the same, along with a host of other major and minor personages, but they are also subtly different, making different decisions, large and small, that set the four stories going off in different directions.
In this unusual way, Auster has delivered one of the strangest semi-autobiographical novels of recent memory. You can view 4-3-2-1 in many ways, but overriding all of these interpretations is the author's quest to answer that most unanswerable of all questions: how would his life have been changed if people had made different choices?
There is very little philosophical reflection in this book. But don’t be misled by the fastidious obsession on incident and character. There’s plenty of theory here too, although that must be supplied by the readers. One of the first conclusions a perspicacious observer brings to the story of Archie Ferguson is that his parents' decisions are even more important than our own. Jean-Paul Sartre once famously declared that we are artists who paint our own lives: "In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing." But if Auster is correct, we are more like the Mona Lisa than Leonardo da Vinci, forced to smile or grimace in a posture and setting determined by those who made us. In the case of Archie Ferguson, so many key parameters of his life—finance, education, romance—are the result of Mom and Dad’s decisions, that even we the readers squirm under the constraints. And if you add in the genetic determinism that all of us embody, the degrees of freedom in Auster's various alternative universes are depressingly limited.
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Yet Auster stops short of absolute fatalism, and at times seems to suggest that our goals and drives triumph in the face of all obstacles. Our four Archies face very different opportunities and hurdles, yet each is destined to grow up to become an author. Their moral and political values seem almost identical, differing more in tactics and modes of engagement, and show a convergence across the four narratives suggesting they are outgrowths of a born character rather than reactions to life's slings and arrows. (I note in passing that these unchanging aspects of Ferguson’s persona and biography are typically those in which he most resembles author Paul Auster.)
I find the notion of multiple Austers quite fitting in this context. There has always been a tension in this writer’s work, almost as if two different authors were battling for supremacy. On the one hand, we have Auster the experimental post-modernist, and that’s the person who would take delight in juxtaposing conflicting and incompatible narratives in a single book. On the other hand, readers have grown familiar with Auster the storyteller, who needs no tricks to keep them turning the pages. Despite the extravagant conceit underlying this book, it’s actually the storytelling Auster who is mostly in control here. And he is operating at top form, filling up each chapter with rich incidents, compelling conflicts, comedy and farce, the tragic and the sublime. And of course there’s plenty of actual history here too. How can there not be, when Archie Ferguson comes of age in the midst of the Vietnam War and student protests, assassinations and race riots, the sexual revolution and the rise of rock ‘n’ roll?
In an interview with The Paris Review , Auster once cited an unexpected source of inspiration. “The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling,” he told Michael Wood. “Every word has to count.” There would seem to be almost nothing in common between a tightly-constructed joke, and a 900-page novel; but one of the great joys of reading 4-3-2-1 is how meticulously Auster constructs each scene in his diverging dramas. The personal turmoils of our hero rarely approach Dostoevskian levels—Ferguson’s biggest infractions are shoplifting books and getting into a barroom brawl—but these are related with almost cinematic vividness. But even the smaller crises of day-to-day live take on a kind of dramatic intensification in these pages.
The most flamboyant part of this novel, its complex four-part structure, makes only the smallest contribution to its success. I found it very easy to get my various Archies mixed up. When you go back and check a previous chapter, you need to make sure you aren’t confusing Chapter 2-1 with Chapter 2-2 or Chapter 2-3. (Yes, each chapter comes adjacent to its 3 variants.) This is a bit too much like keeping track of software upgrades for my taste, and if you run into an incompatibility problem, the ramifications are far-reaching. For example, Amy Schneiderman is our hero’s lover in one iteration of the story, and his step-sister in another. At a certain point, I stopped worrying about the relationship between these mutually exclusive family trees and timelines, and just decided to enjoy each vignette on its own terms.
Archie Ferguson makes a lot of bad choices in the course of these four lifetimes. But Paul Auster rarely falters. My biggest complaint is his reliance on implausible, out-of-the-blue plot devices. Too many people die in strange, sudden ways during the course of this long novel—Auster even makes use of a lightning bolt to dispatch one of our protagonists. Violent accidents play too large a part in the proceedings. I understand why our novelist makes these decisions—he wants to show how chance events can shape a life. But if he needs to resort to lightning bolts to make this point, he actually makes us doubt the very point he is trying to prove.
Even so, I am willing to suspend disbelief. In fact, a reader who tackles a novel that presents four alternative versions of a single life is pretty much forced to do that. And Auster rewards us with the sheer zeal and stamina of his storytelling. This is his biggest novel, and I’m not just talking about its supersized page count or massive accumulation of characters and incidents. Frankly, I don’t expect Auster to surpass this rich multilayered book—well, not unless he gets three more lifetimes to work his magic.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).