When I started reading “4321” Paul Auster was still alive. By the time I finished it he had passed away. That does add an element of difficulty when discussing a work that is far from perfect – one feels that it’s somehow rude to point out the flaws in a recently deceased author’s works.
Nevertheless, here’s my review:
“4321” is doorstop of a book, a massive tome that demands quite a lot of time but not a lot of effort to read. Auster is good writer and he is very capable of writing very readable books. At no point during “4321” will you feel that the writing drags or that you’re struggling to understand what’s going on. In his telling and retelling of Archie Ferguson’s life in all four variations of it, Auster very adeptly makes sure that you don’t lose sight of the plot and get confused wondering which version of Archie are you tracking now.
That’s the highlight of this book, and it may also be its downfall. “4321” is Auster in his most polished, most controlled, and most repetitive. It’s all the previous themes that you’ve met in previous Auster novels, coupled with Auster’s own biography and his love for certain types of characters and relationships. It’s like watching Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” – a work of supreme technical difficulty and accomplishment, polished to a mirror-like quality, and reflecting only the creator himself. Somehow after more than 900 pages you realize that there’s no there there.
The most interesting characters are the ones that Auster glosses over, slotting them into their role in Archie’s narrative (his mother Rose is perhaps the most glaring example of this), and the characters he does care about are… uninteresting. Archie, through his 4 turns in life, never evolves. He’s always a detached, not very interesting young man that looks at the events of the century from the sidelines. His friends also never evolve, and while his path to becoming a writer might be fascinating to Auster, it wasn’t very interesting to me. It was too neat, too clean, too uncomplicated. The whole thing was rather bloodless, the rank opposite of Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” which is a messy but punchy and lively affair.
You spend over 900 pages of uncomplicated, almost light reading, and get to… not a lot really. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been written about elsewhere and much better about love, life, creation and the creative mind. What you do get is to view the supreme craftsmanship of a very good storyteller. Maybe that’s enough. For me it wasn’t.