Editors Reads Verdict
Auster's most ambitious novel — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017 — is an 866-page exploration of how small accidents of birth and circumstance determine entirely different lives, structured as four simultaneous narratives that illuminate each other through contrast and rhyme.
What We Loved
- The structural conceit — four versions of one life — is executed with greater variation and depth than similar experiments manage
- The American historical backdrop (the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the assassinations of the 1960s) gives the four Fergusons' private lives enormous public resonance
- The prose is Auster's most sustained and confident, accumulating detail and character across 866 pages without losing momentum
Minor Drawbacks
- At 866 pages, the novel demands a commitment that will exhaust readers who are not already invested in Auster's project
- The four Fergusons can blur together, requiring active effort from the reader to track which version of the life they are currently in
- Some critics found the novel over-long and insufficiently edited — a charge that is not entirely unfair
Key Takeaways
- → The self is not fixed but contingent — small accidents of circumstance produce radically different people from the same starting material
- → American history of the 20th century is not background but the medium through which private lives are shaped
- → Fiction can hold multiple incompatible truths simultaneously in a way that realism, which must commit to one version of events, cannot
| Author | Paul Auster |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Picador |
| Pages | 866 |
| Published | January 31, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Committed readers of literary fiction willing to invest in a long, structurally ambitious novel; those interested in American history, parallel-lives fiction, and Auster's mature work. |
Four Archibald Fergusons
Auster’s conceit is clean: Archie Ferguson is born in Newark in 1947, and from that single origin point Auster follows four versions of his life. The sections are numbered (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4; then 2.1, 2.2, etc.) to keep the versions legible. Each Ferguson diverges based on accidents: what happens to his father’s business, whether his mother stays or leaves, which city the family ends up in, which girl he falls in love with, whether he goes to Columbia or Princeton or somewhere else. One Ferguson dies young; the others survive into adulthood.
Each becomes a writer of some kind, but the form — novelist, journalist, translator, poet — reflects the accumulated difference of their circumstances. Auster’s specific achievement is that each version feels fully inhabited rather than schematic: the four Fergusons are not thought experiments but people. The structural discipline required to maintain four simultaneous life histories across 866 pages without allowing them to collapse into each other or merge into a single blurred composite is considerable, and Auster manages it. Reading the novel in sequence — always returning to Ferguson, always finding him altered — produces something like the sensation of watching time pass at four different speeds simultaneously, each speed producing a different man from the same raw material.
America in the 1960s
The four Fergusons grow up in the same decade of American history, but their relationships to it differ based on where they are and who they are by then. The Civil Rights movement, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam War and its draft, the Columbia student protests of 1968 — all four encounter these events, but from different positions: one is politically active, another is a bystander, a third is directly affected by the draft in a way the others are not. Auster uses the parallel structure to argue that American history is not one story but many stories happening simultaneously, and that which story you are in depends on accidents you did not choose.
The 1960s as lived experience — not the mythology the decade subsequently became but the confusion, the grief, the moments when the country seemed to be genuinely falling apart — is rendered with impressive fidelity. Auster was a young man in New York during this period, and the novel carries the authority of someone reconstructing not a researched past but a remembered one. The four Fergusons’ different relationships to the same historical events function as a kind of argument about testimony: there is no single account of what the 1960s were, only what they were for specific people in specific places, shaped by the accidents that determined who those people had become.
Scale and Ambition
4 3 2 1 was Auster’s penultimate novel and his most overt claim to major-novelist status — an attempt to do for American life what Tolstoy did for Russian life, or what Franzen does at a smaller scale: to use fiction’s capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously to say something about what a country is and what it costs its people. The Booker Prize shortlist in 2017 confirmed the novel’s ambitions were taken seriously, even by critics who found it over-long.
The death of Auster in April 2024, shortly after the publication of his final novel Baumgartner, gives 4 3 2 1 a retrospective weight: this was the novel in which he committed everything he knew about American life to 866 pages, before pulling back for the intimate elegy of his last book. Read alongside The New York Trilogy, it reveals the arc of a literary career that moved from the postmodern dissolution of the self to its most sustained reconstruction. Where the Trilogy asked what happens when a self is systematically dismantled, 4 3 2 1 asks what a self is made of — and answers: everything that happened to you, plus everything that didn’t, plus all the versions of you that almost were.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — Auster’s most ambitious novel — an 866-page parallel-lives portrait of American identity in the 1960s that rewards the commitment it asks for.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "4 3 2 1" about?
Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey — and Auster follows four parallel versions of his life, diverging from the same starting point based on small accidents of circumstance, through the turbulent American 1960s and into the early 1970s.
Who should read "4 3 2 1"?
Committed readers of literary fiction willing to invest in a long, structurally ambitious novel; those interested in American history, parallel-lives fiction, and Auster's mature work.
What are the key takeaways from "4 3 2 1"?
The self is not fixed but contingent — small accidents of circumstance produce radically different people from the same starting material American history of the 20th century is not background but the medium through which private lives are shaped Fiction can hold multiple incompatible truths simultaneously in a way that realism, which must commit to one version of events, cannot
Is "4 3 2 1" worth reading?
Auster's most ambitious novel — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017 — is an 866-page exploration of how small accidents of birth and circumstance determine entirely different lives, structured as four simultaneous narratives that illuminate each other through contrast and rhyme.
Ready to Read 4 3 2 1?
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