The Brooklyn Follies

By Paul Auster.

If you read the New York Trilogy in Dr. Rawson's class last year, don't expect the same book. The Brooklyn Follies is a much more human book. It's situated around Nathan Glass, a divorced, aging, depressed, lung cancer survivor looking only for a place to die quitely--his pick is Brooklyn, which is of course not such a place at all. Fortunately for him, he's forced to deal with his own unquiet past in the form of his overweight, (perhaps) underachieving nephew Tom, an event that quickly and untidly deposits Nathan at the center of a minor family crisis. At times suprisingly affirmitive, and at others shakingly brooding (glimpses of City of Glass' Auster) this is a book about the extra-normality of place, the life that goes on there, and the redemptive force of it. It's very good.