In the glow of his late-career self-satisfaction Auster has assumed the role of the US’s cultural curator, reinforcing the myth memes of an era whose vigour and success reflect his own. We get Muhammad Ali saying, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger” cut-ups of iconic speeches by Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy baseball games the March on Washington.Ĭulturally speaking, we were already sick of the 1960s in the 1990s, yet Auster leads us on another forced march through a decade that has been mythologised to death. There’s little you wouldn’t glean from a couple of Woodstock documentaries and a good old-fashioned Wiki binge. At times 4 3 2 1 reads like a history book that offers no fresh interpretation, complacently ticking off events long familiar to a global consciousness steeped in Yankee soft power: Vietnam, JFK, the civil-rights movement, Charles Manson, the Black Panthers. No sooner have we read our way through his baby-boomer childhood, in chapter 1.1, than the clock reverses and we have to go through it all again in chapter 1.2, except differently, with fresh trials and triumphs along each of the four branches.īackdrop: fabled middle years of the American century. This is an intriguing and novel device, but we have a problem: it’s not that Archie Ferguson isn’t a very interesting character it’s that he’s four not very interesting characters.

Archie Ferguson gets himself born one day in 1947 and then, for reasons that become clear 800 pages later – by which point the knackered reader may not greatly care – his life splits into four narrative threads, as in some theoretical quantum-multiverse thing. But wait: there isn't just one hero there are four, except they're all the same hero – sort of. Paul Auster's first novel in seven years, 4 3 2 1, begins with just such a leisurely account of its hero's grandparents. The suspicion of authorial presumption is stronger when the book in question is a brick of a thing, harking back to the days when folks had little else to distract them, so one may as well kick off with 50 pages on the hero’s grandparents.

Every book that gets written is an act of insolence, in that for the time it takes to read we are asked to neglect the storehouse of canonical masterpieces whose perusal would fill any human lifespan.

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