4 3 2 1
by Paul Auster
I have literally spent hours complaining about how much I hated 4 3 2 1 to my friends. It was so awful, I wish I’d never read it. I wished for an alternate timeline of my own life so I could go back and live out another path where I didn’t have to waste my time thumbing through the 900-paged doorstop. So I don’t have to spend anymore time on it than I have already, and so I can instead focus on removing it completely from my brain, I’ll try to keep my review brief.
Paul Auster writes of a young boy whose life splits into four factions and lives out four completely different paths. It was a fascinating premise, especially since one would think the factions would occur during a life-altering choice. If he was torn between two women, married one in path #1 and the other in path #2, that would have made sense. Accepting a scholarship from a college or taking a job instead; that would make sense. But these fractures happen at moments that have nothing to do with the main character, and he just passively moseys along. In one life, his father’s warehouse burns down. In another, his father dies of a heart attack.
The basic theme of the alternate timelines was a huge disappointment. Rather than seeing how a boy’s choices result in drastically different young men in his future, it continually drives home “The more things change the more they stay the same.” How is that entertaining? To read about the same things happening four different ways to the same extremely unlikable protagonist. He’s not particularly nice, he’s egotistical, and perhaps the most self-absorbed character I’ve ever read. Pages upon pages upon chapters of his navel-gazing and justifying his love of self and belief that he, his thoughts, and his deliberations of his tiny problems are the most important things in the universe – it’s exhausting, frustrating, and quite frankly, horrifying that this was published, without a severe edit, and hailed by critics.
When I read the ending, I realized the novel clearly hit home for the author. Apparently, Auster himself was so egotistical he thought it would be entertaining for others to read about four imaginary lives of his imaginary literary self who is neither likable, honorable, intelligent, kind, nor interesting. Don’t be taken in by the first page. It’s fantastic, but it doesn’t mean you have to read the remaining nine hundred.
Paul Auster writes of a young boy whose life splits into four factions and lives out four completely different paths. It was a fascinating premise, especially since one would think the factions would occur during a life-altering choice. If he was torn between two women, married one in path #1 and the other in path #2, that would have made sense. Accepting a scholarship from a college or taking a job instead; that would make sense. But these fractures happen at moments that have nothing to do with the main character, and he just passively moseys along. In one life, his father’s warehouse burns down. In another, his father dies of a heart attack.
The basic theme of the alternate timelines was a huge disappointment. Rather than seeing how a boy’s choices result in drastically different young men in his future, it continually drives home “The more things change the more they stay the same.” How is that entertaining? To read about the same things happening four different ways to the same extremely unlikable protagonist. He’s not particularly nice, he’s egotistical, and perhaps the most self-absorbed character I’ve ever read. Pages upon pages upon chapters of his navel-gazing and justifying his love of self and belief that he, his thoughts, and his deliberations of his tiny problems are the most important things in the universe – it’s exhausting, frustrating, and quite frankly, horrifying that this was published, without a severe edit, and hailed by critics.
When I read the ending, I realized the novel clearly hit home for the author. Apparently, Auster himself was so egotistical he thought it would be entertaining for others to read about four imaginary lives of his imaginary literary self who is neither likable, honorable, intelligent, kind, nor interesting. Don’t be taken in by the first page. It’s fantastic, but it doesn’t mean you have to read the remaining nine hundred.