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The Brooklyn Follies
by Paul Auster
A despondent insurance salesman finds a new life in Brooklyn in the latest novel from the author of "Oracle Night."
Henry Holt and Co., 320 pages
12/27/2005
$24.00
ISBN: 0805077146
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Boston Globe Paul Kafka-Gibbons
Auster has written a sublime soap opera about the ways in which people abandon and save one another. He captures a historical moment, our twisted America, and he offers a message of hope.
San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
"The Brooklyn Follies" is a classical work of American literature in the most traditional 19th century meaning of the phrase. It is a multilayered tapestry, with whimsical chapter headings and Dickensian depth. It is a novel striving for a true sense of community as opposed to the relentlessly obsessive banner of individuality that has become the crutch of most contemporary American fiction.
The Spectator John de Falbe
Although the novel is set in America, there is no sense that the author has a sustained critique to purvey. It is to Auster’s credit that he avoids writing a Great American Novel in the manner of some of his contemporaries. The result is that his work has a lightness of touch that gives it resonance beyond just American society.
Booklist Donna Seaman
This addition to [Auster's] increasingly tender cycle of love songs to Brooklyn is his most down-to-earth, sensuous, and socially conscious novel to date. [1 Oct. 2005, p. 5]
Publishers Weekly
Auster's graceful, offhand storytelling carries readers along, with enough shadow to keep the tale this side of schmaltz.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Hucksters, people vanishing and reappearing, problems with language, the glancing invocation of those stalwarts Hawthorne and Poe and Thoreau and Whitman, whose presence is sprinkled throughout this author's body of work--yes, it's Auster.
Los Angeles Times Wendy Smith
The warmth and gusto that New York City's most populous borough sparks in Auster, a longtime Brooklyn resident, sustain this novel's appeal even when the author tries our patience with coy asides, a few stock characters (a warmhearted drag queen, an earthy widow) and some highly unlikely plot twists. [8 Jan. 2006]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Ken Babstock
The tone of The Brooklyn Follies trips so lightly between gravitas and moments of levity, between Wittgenstein and gumshoe, that most readers will stay along for the ride, and the restoration. Slightly more disappointing, however, are the moments of uninspired dialogue weighed down with cliché and stiff humour. [7 Jan. 2006]
The Guardian Michael Dibdin
Auster has always been a master of pacing and the pages turn lightly.
The Independent Matt Thorne
The fates of Auster's characters are always significant, and while in the past he has locked them inside rooms or forced them to build insignificant walls, here it is the entire American nation which is imprisoned, and that such a stark conclusion really makes this an utterly despairing novel.
The New York Times Book Review Walter Kirn
Auster, who... used to play the human Uncertainty Principle for spooky atonal up-to-date effects, has chosen this time to sing a simpler tune that would seem to be beneath him, intellectually. This must be for a purpose, or several of them, and the novel's weird time frame hints at the most obvious one: to soften us up with olden-days orthodoxies so that he can subvert them in the end.
Washington Post Jeff Turrentine
In many ways, The Brooklyn Follies is a welcome sign that Auster, whose fictional universe can too often seem mechanistic and overdetermined, is finally relaxing a little.
Daily Telegraph Ophelia Field
This book will make you re-warm to Auster if you thought you had 'done' him, and should win him new admirers on this softer, more sentimental side of the Channel.
USA Today Bob Minzesheimer
A charming, beguiling story about the terrible beauty of families and the redemptive power of love.
PopMatters Zachary Houle
Far from [Auster's] best book, but far from his worst, Brooklyn bares the mark of both a transitional work and an authorial holding pattern.
Daily Telegraph Will Cohu
The Brooklyn Follies is a bewildering novel, not for its narrative strategies, which are comfortingly conventional, but because it is a book of happy endings. Paul Auster has never before written anything so reader-friendly.
Village Voice Brandon Stosuy
The novel is more joyful and community based than previous existential Auster offerings, and when the... finale happens, you might feel too keen a tug for a wider, Oprah-tested audience. As a result, unlike his past work, it fails to haunt.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
As pleasant as it is to enjoy Auster's smooth writing and engaging characters without the death spiral, "Brooklyn Follies" never feels like a major work.
The Independent Eric Homberger
There is little emotional tumult or cost in accepting the claim others make upon the narrator. It does not make for a particularly engaging or strenuous moral challenge to the characters in the novel--or the readers of novel.
Bookslut Ned Vizzini
Interestingly, it’s the two plots that fizzle up in failure... that make The Brooklyn Follies worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews
An egregious misstep in an otherwise estimable career.
The New Yorker
Less hopeful than hollow, and profoundly disengaged.
Wall Street Journal Stefan Beck
Where Mr. Auster's language is pedestrian, his anecdotes and characters are doubly so. It's disappointing that Mr. Auster, a long-time Brooklyner, would choose to sketch such Fat Albert-like cartoons of urban life.
 The average user rating for this book is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 12 User Votes
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