Brooklyn Follies, Brooklyn Follies... what in the *flying pink Jesus* is it about this book that brings readers swarming to the Auster board every autumn like mosquitos to the tidal basin. Is it a single French professor of English who assigns this dreary tome each school-year to save himself the trouble of having to update his old lecture notes??? Why not throw on The Ox-Bow Incident, The Red Pony, Brother Can You Spare a Dime and every other numbingly dull volume ever calculated to put a generation of budding adolescent writers to sleep. Brooklyn Follies, oh God.
I will try to help you by answering by heart, I will think of 5 (not 20, seems too much) moments in the book I really liked - :
1. at the beginning, a passage which explains that living in Brooklyn was a choice of inner retreat
2. Passage about daughter, where he says he doesn't think his daughter is a very interesting person.
3. When he discovers his nephew in the bookstore, about the coincidence that whenever he came in, the nephew was upstairs, except for that one time.
4. The description of the fat queeny lovable crook who owns the bookstore.
5. The passage when he proposes to Joyce's mother (what was her name? anyway the mother whose pretty daughter had a husband named jimmy joyce)when he proposes and she refuses by weeping so touched she is by his effort to conform to expectations, despite his total inability to have ever done so.
