First, the novel: Paul Auster’s
The Brooklyn Follies is another under-the-radar
American classic, joining others I’ve read and written about in this space,
Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, John Williams’ Stoner, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley
The likeable narrator and
protagonist, Nathan Glass, is a lung cancer survivor, now retired from a life
insurance company. He is divorced and
seeks anonymity by relocating to his old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. He envisions it as the place for his life’s
ending. Instead, it would be a new
beginning.
Park Slope is the perfect
setting for the metafictional parts of the novel as Auster himself lived
there. He passed away earlier this year;
it was his obituary that reminded me to read him. I was interested in this particular novel as
I too had lived in Park Slope as a young adult during my first marriage.
Nathan has no relationship
with his ex wife other than being disdained by her. He is estranged from his only daughter,
Rachel, and Auster engineers their reconciliation as the consequence of a
subplot.
So much of modern
literature is about families coming apart.
Instead, Auster sees Nathan as a change agent, endowing him with a
charisma that is instrumental in bringing families and people together,
including a niece Aurora (“Rory”) and nephew, Tom. In this regard, this is an unusually joyous
post modern piece of fiction of redemption and second chances, so deeply
satisfying.
Tom was a brilliant
graduate student when Nathan last saw him years before. Chance encounters plays a significant role in
the novel such as when Nathan finds a dispirited Tom working in Brightman’s
Attic, a local bookstore. That encounter
sets everything in motion. He takes his
nephew to lunch at Cosmic Diner where Nathan flirts more than usual with his
favorite waitress, Marina, not only to impress Tom but because he was in “such
buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed [Tom}, and now it turned
out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from
each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, NY.”
From there, a cast of
unrelated characters are brought together in some way:
Tom, his nephew and Rory, his niece (who was
held captive by her second husband, a religious cult member).
Rachel, Nathan’s daughter.
Lucy, Rory’s nine year old daughter (who Rory
sends alone to Tom in a daring attempt to free her daughter from the cult).
Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), ex convict,
gay, a lover of books but engaged in art and manuscript forgery.
Nancy Mazzuchelli (aka the “B.P.M. –
Beautiful Perfect Mother”), who Tom has an unrealistic crush on, Uncle Nathan
straightening that out, and who figures prominently at the novel’s denouement.
Stanley Chowder, proprietor of the Chowder
Inn in Vermont, which Tom and Nathan think of buying with Brightman, their idea
of “Hotel Existence.”
Honey Chowder, Stanley’s daughter, a 4th
grade unmarried teacher who invades Tom's life.
Joyce, Nancy’s mother, a widow, who unexpectedly
becomes Nathan’s lover.
There are more characters
in the air, but these are the ones who Nathan, survivor of chemotherapy, keeper
of “The Book of Human Folly,” his notebook of "every blunder, every
pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act
I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man,” comes to touch
or rescue in some way. He literally
rescues his niece, Rory: “Aurora chose
to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and
saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that
afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she
knew that she could trust me. So we got
together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting
at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little
we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and
now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby
sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued
to haunt me, her children had now become my children.”
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234 Lincoln Place
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I had such a personal
investment in reading this book as I lived at 234 Lincoln Place for a couple of
years. I remember running from that
brownstone apartment, frantically trying to get a cab on Flatbush Avenue at 2:00AM
one night in late February, 1965 to get my ex wife who was in labor to the
Brooklyn Hospital. Auster mentions The
Berkeley Carroll School at 181 Lincoln Place which would have been a half block
from where we lived. Such a school could
not have existed then, before gentrification. In fact, that is what stands out so strikingly
reading the novel: the degree to which the neighborhood has changed just during
my lifetime. It’s become Brooklyn’s
version of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another one of my old abodes. Many of the places he mentions, the diners,
the bookstores, the schools, didn’t exist then.
But streets, such as Carroll Street, where our friends at the time,
Morris Eaves and his wife lived, and 7th avenue where we did our
shopping, and of course Prospect Park, resonate. The mention of Carroll Street reminded me of Morris,
so I Googled my long forgotten acquaintance and school-mate who became a
Professor and a well known William Blake scholar. I thought I’d write him, sadly only to find
his recent obituary.
We moved from Park Slope as
my ex wife wanted to go to graduate school after our son was born, so we moved
back to downtown Brooklyn to be near LIU.
I envy that Auster had
developed deep roots there and his love of everything Park Slope glitters in
this novel.
Our protagonist/narrator,
Nathan, after performing such healing reconciliations and introductions, has a
medical emergency which again parallels one that deeply resonates. He had all the symptoms and the pain of a
heart attack. And suddenly he’s in a
hospital. He was convinced his life was
over. “I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled
desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the
ceiling, above the roof of the hospital.
I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure
with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I
have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the
same time. That’s what happens to you
when you land in a hospital. They take
off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you
stop being yourself.”
In the ER and in his room,
while tests are being made, other patients come and go; they face a common
foe. I’ve been there myself on a number
of occasions, and I know the feeling which Auster painfully resurrects. While lying there his mind works overtime,
trying to make sense of all of it and he has an epiphany for a business: “to
form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the
stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a
continuous narrative, the narrative of a life” (Actually, a damn good idea as
he envisions the financing to be a surcharge on a life insurance policy –
something he knows something about. In
effect, it’s a vanity book, but fully paid for via the insurance policy. Why not?)
“[O]nce the pages had been
printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something
to hold on to for the rest of their lives.
Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive
us all.”…“One should never underestimate the power of books.” I emphasize the last sentence as it aptly
describes The Brooklyn Follies and I
can imagine the author talking to me, as a motivational statement to finish my
own memoir which I now have in draft form, dragging my heels to complete merely
because of ‘who cares?’ outside family and friends. I think Auster would say “who cares who
cares?”
Spoiler alert here about
the ending (although I knew it in advance – there is even some foreshadowing --and
the knowledge only intensified the impact for me). Luckily for Nathan, the presumed heart attack
turned out to be merely an inflamed esophagus and he is discharged from the
hospital and is on his way home early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, in a joyous
mood about the future. “Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues.” The
conclusion of this early post 9/11 novel comes down like a sledgehammer.
There is a segue from the
Auster book to the second, a work of non-fiction: Auster was a baseball fan and in fact it was
said he became a writer because as a kid he had an opportunity to get Willie
Mays’ autograph but he didn’t have a pencil.
From there on in, he carried one, and a pad, and that began his writing
career. (No doubt the beginnings of “The
Book of Human Folly”.) So as I was reading the Auster novel I was finishing what
would most aptly be called an encyclopedic narrative, The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin
Baker. It really deserves its own full
blown entry, but how does one review an encyclopedia? It has New York City in common with Brooklyn Follies, and like the novel it
makes a special personal connection.
The story of the unique,
almost symbiotic development of the city and baseball is laid out by Baker as a
Dickinsonian novel with a huge cast of characters. “Whitman called it ‘America’s game; it has
the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our
institutions, fits into them as significantly as our laws; it is just as
important in the total of our historic life’” “To Mark Twain it was ‘the very
symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and
struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, 19th century’“.
Mirroring American life,
the game’s owners were “in the game for the most American reasons: organize
commercialize monopolize“
Before 1890 its
development was a somewhat random event.
By then it began to resemble the game which we follow today and became
our only major professional sport at the time.
In NY it was a multi
ethnic affair, mirroring the city itself, German, Irish, even eleven known
Jewish players, but like other sins of society, Afro Americans were not
accepted, even in NY. They began to
develop their own leagues; many of those teams and players of major league
caliber.
As the sport grew, “the
vertical city was born, “skyscrapers, bridges, churches, museums but perhaps
the greatest creations during the beginning of the century were the city’s
train stations. “Built less than 10
years and a few blocks apart, “the new Beau Arts Grand Central terminal, lavish
with statues and it’s soaring, 125 – foot ceiling adored with a gorgeous blue
map of the zodiac. And across town, Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania station, a
symphony and steel and honey marble, large enough, in the novelist, Thomas Wolf’s
phrase ‘to hold the sound of time’ yet still a structure of measureless beauty.“
It’s all here in this
definitive work, with all the heroes and miscreants that made up our national
pastime and the building of the world’s greatest city. The writing is spellbinding such as these two
pages describing the glories of the city in the 1920’s. The reader feels a part of a previous era:
Baseball, NY, and the
1950’s was my childhood. On our way to
school we’d argue about who is the best centerfielder in NY. I said Mantle, a Dodger fan said Snyder, and
the lone Giant friend said Mays. He was
right of course.
Mays and Ruth are a category
onto themselves. The book ends before
the Mays era though. In fact I was
finishing this book when the Say Hey Kid’s death was reported. He began his career in the Negro leagues,
playing briefly for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons joining Ruth as the
greatest baseball player ever. Ruth‘s
heroic feats and gargantuan appetite for everything life had to offer though
are covered in detail in Baker’s book.
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Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs 1920-1965
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So many of the minor
players can be found in its pages; such as Phil Rizzuto who went to my high
school and was rejected by the Dodgers and Giants, but the New York Yankees
recognized his fielding, bunting, and love of the game and the rest is
history. When Ann and I were having
dinner at the Stadium Club sometime in the 1980s, and he was broadcasting with
Bill White, they came in to have dinner before the game. He called out to everyone that he had a
headache and was wondering whether anyone had an aspirin. My wife’s handy pill box came out while she
exclaimed, “I have some, Phil.” He came
over to the table and I told him that my father went to Richmond Hill High
School with him to which he exclaimed his patented “Holy Cow.”
I can’t remember another
social / sports history that can compare to The
New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker. Holy Cow!
