Brooklyn Follies

Nathan Glass in Brooklyn

Nathan Glass arrives in Brooklyn having already made his peace with a diminished future. Divorced, recently recovered from lung cancer, and estranged from the habits of a life spent selling insurance, he has moved to a neighbourhood he barely knows with a plan that amounts to little more than waiting to die without making a fuss about it. He is fifty-nine years old and has decided that the world owes him nothing and that this is fine.

What Auster does with this promising premise is not tragic but comic. Nathan is a genuinely funny narrator — self-deprecating, caustic about his own past, alert to the absurdity of his position with the dry precision of a man who has spent decades assessing risk. The Brooklyn he settles into is particular and warm: the diners along Seventh Avenue, the coffee shops where he reads the paper, the Park Slope streets with their mix of brownstones and corner bodegas and parents pushing strollers. It is a neighbourhood that functions as a village inside a city, where the same faces reappear and small recognitions accumulate into something resembling community.

The novel’s first movement is the gradual erosion of Nathan’s certainty that he has nothing left to want. He encounters his nephew Tom working in a used bookshop — the coincidence entirely unplanned, the kind of ordinary miracle that Auster treats as the actual texture of city life — and the encounter begins, slowly, to dismantle the settled quietness of Nathan’s intended ending. Brooklyn, Auster suggests, is not neutral ground. It is a place that makes things happen to people who have decided nothing further will happen to them.

Tom and the Bookshop

Tom Wood is Nathan’s nephew by his sister, a former PhD candidate whose dissertation on Hawthorne — which he never finished — stands as the monument to a life that got away from him somewhere between graduate school and the working world. He is thirty-something, pleasant, defeated in the specific way of people who loved books too much to survive academia but not enough to become writers. He has landed, somewhat accidentally, in a Brooklyn used bookshop owned by Harry Brightman, and his daily life among the stacks has given him a kind of peace that his former scholarly ambitions never did.

Harry Brightman is one of Auster’s finest minor characters — cultivated, slightly suspect, capable of real warmth and mild dishonesty simultaneously. His involvement in a scheme around a forged manuscript provides the novel’s external plot mechanics, and the subplot is eventually complicated by the arrival of Lucy, Tom’s niece, who has been abandoned by her unstable mother and arrives in the bookshop as an inconvenient fact in need of a home.

But Auster is more interested in Tom’s interiority than in these plot machinations. The man who loved Hawthorne enough to spend years thinking about him but not enough to finish thinking about him is a portrait of a particular kind of literary disappointment — the reader who fell short of becoming something more. What Nathan’s renewed engagement with life does for Tom is to restore to him the possibility of expectation, which is perhaps all that any of us can do for one another.

September 10, 2001

Brooklyn Follies ends on the morning of September 10, 2001. Nathan wakes up in a state of uncomplicated happiness — the crises have resolved, the people he loves are more or less where they should be, Brooklyn is doing what Brooklyn does in early September. He registers the clarity of the morning, the particular quality of the light, the sense that life has come around to something he no longer expected to feel. The novel ends there.

Auster does not write the following morning. He does not need to. Every reader knows exactly what happens on September 11, 2001, and the knowledge arrives in the final sentences with a force that cannot be manufactured by any description. The happiness is real — it has been earned across three hundred pages of carefully accumulated comedy and connection — and it is devastated by what the reader supplies, invisibly, the moment the date registers.

This is one of the most artful endings in Auster’s career because it uses historical knowledge as a narrative device, turning the reader’s memory into a formal element of the text. The novel’s entire comedy — the second chances, the improbable rescues, the warmth of a neighbourhood that makes people want to keep living — is lit from behind by the knowledge that the morning Nathan is enjoying is the last ordinary morning New York City will have for a very long time. Personal happiness and historical catastrophe are not reconciled; they are simply placed in the same sentence, and the effect is to insist that both were real.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Auster’s most generous novel, a comedy of Brooklyn life and second chances whose final sentence delivers one of the most quietly devastating endings in contemporary American fiction.

Reading Guides

• Paul Auster Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)