The Brooklyn Follies

24 October, 2009 13:52:00

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Auster's native Brooklyn is painted with an affection which manages not to be sentimental, and the characters, despite their quirks and weaknesses, are likeable because they are human and because they can change for the better.

Paul Auster

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, so I rented an apartment there. The oncologist had said my lung cancer was in remission but I didn't necessarily believe him; so when my daughter Rachel came down to cheer me up I told her I didn't really give a damn about her or her platitudes. You could say that I've never been good at relationships.

Enough about me. This book is really about my nephew, Tom. To say I was amazed when I found him working in Harry Lightman's secondhand bookshop would be an understatement. When I'd last seen him, he'd been a bright, good-looking man. Now, he was overweight and beaten. I took him out for lunch.

Tom told me about how his life had gone downhill since college, how he had become estranged from his sister, Aurora, who'd got mixed up in porn and drugs, how he fancied this woman whom he called Beautiful Perfect Mother (BPM) and how he'd come to work for Harry.

"He's not who he seems," he confided. "He's been in prison for an art scam."

None of this bothered me and I soon made friends with both BPM and Harry, but everything changed when Aurora's 10-year-old daughter Lucy turned up unexpectedly at the bookshop.

Lucy refused to speak so I was unable to discover her mother's whereabouts. In desperation, I arranged for her to stay with some relations in Vermont and headed up-country.

Unknown to us, Lucy tipped several tins of Coke in the gas tank and we came to a halt for five days at The Chowder Inn. Such are the whims of fate. Here in the cocoon of the unreal, Tom met Honey and I decided Lucy should live with me after all. And here, we heard that Harry had died after he had been threatened with exposure over a forged Hawthorne manuscript.

On our return to Brooklyn the sense of fluffy planets colliding in a rollercoaster of mixed metaphors and over-blown set pieces hurtling towards a series of neatly-contrived happy endings continued apace. Harry had left the building and the business to Tom, who settled down and lived happily ever after with Honey. Ah! Lucy started talking and moved in with Tom and Honey. Ah! Rachel and I were reconciled and she soon announced I would be a grandfather. Ah!

I tracked down Aurora to a strange religious sect in North Carolina where she was being held prisoner by her wicked second husband, David. Boo!

"Thank you so much for saving me, Uncle Nathan," she cried. "Even though I wasn't really in any danger and could have walked out any time, I am grateful to you for rescuing me." Ah!

Aurora came back with me to Brooklyn and started a committed lesbian relationship with BPM who had left her beastly husband. Risqué but Ah!

And me? I had started a relationship with BPM's mother. Ah! As I kissed her one night, I felt a crushing pain in my left arm. Boo! Was I going to die? No. Ah!

But I am an important novelist, so I can't let things end like this. As I left the hospital it was 8am on September 11, 2001.