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If life is, as Jorge Luis Borges suggested, a garden of forking paths, then alternatives proliferate with every step.
To the extent that it reduces the vertigo of possibilities to a single, narrow track, traditional fiction is a fraud. But for Jane Austen’s manipulation, Elizabeth Bennet might just as well have married William Collins or George Wickham as Fitzwilliam Darcy.
In “Right, Left, or Straight Ahead?,” Lazlo Flute arrives at a rural crossroads. The story follows each direction he could take. “Right, Left or Straight Ahead?” was written by Archie Ferguson, an adolescent character in Paul Auster’s bounteous new novel, “4321,” and it offers a key to the entire book’s design.
With spare philosophical mysteries such as “The New York Trilogy,” “City of Glass” and “The Book of Illusions,” Auster established himself as a master of metaphysical metafiction.
4321
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt, $32.50
At 866 pages, “4321” could swallow up several of Auster’s earlier books. With echoes of “The Adventures of Augie March” and “American Pastoral,” it is a vast, sprawling American Jewish bildungsroman that draws the reader in from the very first sentence and does not let go until the very end.
But it would not be an Auster novel without some formal pyrotechnics — its chapters alternate among four versions of Archie Ferguson’s coming of age — four novels for the price of one.
The irresistible opening paragraph explains how a Jewish kid from New Jersey ends up tagged with the Scottish name Ferguson. Immigrating from Minsk, his grandfather Isaac Reznikoff was advised by a fellow Jew that to succeed in America he should change his name to Rockefeller. However, by the time 19-year-old Reznikoff comes before an immigration official, he cannot recall the name he is supposed to claim.
“Slapping his head in frustration,” we are told, “the weary immigrant blurted out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I’ve forgotten)! And so it was that Isaac Reznikoff began his new life in America as Ichabod Ferguson.”
Auster’s take on the legend of Ellis Island christenings is hilarious in itself, enough to make it impossible not to keep turning pages. However, it also announces the theme of contingency, a vision of identity as fluid and improvised, the consequence of happenstance.
The novel’s protagonist begins life on a different trajectory as Ferguson than he would have as Reznikoff or Rockefeller. Born March 3, 1947, he belongs to a generation that undergoes the traumas of a presidential assassination, violent racial unrest and a divisive, unpopular war. Faced with the uncertainties of a military draft, young Ferguson learns that nothing is immutable.
Beyond its value as a meditation on contingency, “4321” is an absorbing, detailed account — four accounts! — of growing up in the decades Holiganbet following World War II. In one or more versions of his life, Ferguson is born in New Jersey, develops close and abiding friendships, and falls in love with sports, books and other human beings. In one version, he attends Columbia University, in another Princeton, and in yet another he skips off to Paris to school himself.
He develops erotic relationships with a variety of women and, in one version, men. Alone at a screening of “Children of Paradise” at the Thalia, the Upper West Side repertory cinema, Ferguson is picked up by an older man who initiates him in the pleasures of same-sex coupling. Since Ferguson in the other versions is exclusively and avidly heterosexual, the (dubious) implication is that sexual orientation, like everything else in the novel, is conditional, that circumstances, not genetics, make one straight, gay or bisexual.
Auster’s prose is never less than arresting, but some more memorable moments include the 1967 Newark riot that leaves dozens dead and the city gutted, a visit to the lovably louche Horn & Hardart automat, a store owner waiting in the dark with a baseball bat to confront his arsonists, a tense encounter between all-white and all-black basketball teams, and student protests that paralyze Columbia University in 1968. Whether devouring books or stealing them, working as house painter or journalist, breaking his leg or his heart, Ferguson remains a character worth following through multiple avatars.
In addition to being a bildungsroman, “4321” is a “künstlerroman,” a portrait of the artist as a young man whose literary ambition is evident even in childhood. It is also a self-begetting novel, the story of its own genesis. By the final pages, Ferguson resolves to write a novel very much like the one we have just finished reading: “He would invent three other versions of himself and tell their stories along with his own story … and write a book about four identical but different people with the same name: Ferguson.”
Since any life has more than four forking paths, I emerged from a week immersed in this prodigious book eager for more.
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