This is the first book that I listed in one of my monthly updates before I had not finished it, but I’ve now have read all 866 pages each one filled with dense prose with almost no dialogue, so now it’s time to try to put my thoughts down on paper.

This is a mammoth novel, not just in its length of nearly  (described as 133,000 double spaced typed pages by Auster), but in its reach and scope.  Auster has decided to expand the standard novelistic approach of bildungsroman which describes a child’s growth from a newborn to a fully developed young man, by telling not one but four stories of the life of  Archibald Ferguson, aka Archie.  He utilizes this unorthodox framework to address two major themes:  the contingency of life’s events and the inevitable death we will all face.

This creative approach begins with the old  joke about the East European Jewish immigrant who enters Ellis Island and is asked for his name. When he replies in Yiddish “Ich bod fergessen”, i.e. “I’ve forgotten”, the immigration official assigns him the name of Isaac Ferguson.  Auster launches the book with an introductory paragraph in which the members of the Ferguson family are introduced starting with the Minsk native, Isaac Reznikoff who arrives at Ellis Island in 1900 and is promptly dubbed Ike Ferguson after he forgets the name another shtarker suggests, Rockefeller.  We also meet Ferguson’s three sons, Lew, Arnold, and Stanley (the latter, Archie’s father), the Adler family (Benjy, Emma, Mildred and Rose, Archie’s mother), aunts, uncles,  and cousins, and we learn how Stanley and Rose establish their businesses.  The first chapter ends with the birth of Archie on March 3, 1947.

From that point on, the story takes four different paths, each indicated by numbers. It took me about 200 pages to realize that I was totally confused as to which Archie I was reading about. At that point, I began to try to understand the four separate Archie’s by keeping a running summary of Archie 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 as each one accumulated a life through Archie 7.4.  To summarize each of these life stories would be too confusing and take pages and pages.  Suffice it to say that Auster has written four novels in this one book, each rich in love, disappointment, success, and the complex events that comprise a life.  In the book’s final pages, Archie’s mother tells him the joke about Ike Ferguson.  Archie views it as the paradigm for the “human destiny and the endlessly forking paths a person must confront as he walks through this life.”  In his case, Auster multiplies Archie into three young men, each one identical to the others but with a different name, a name which determines how he will be viewed in America.

In Archie 7.4, the question of how a different name would have changed his life becomes the theme for Archie’s next book which is the one I was holding, the story of four identical but different people with the same name. “Archie was still traveling the two roads he had imagined as a fourteen year old boy, still walking down the three roads with Lazlo Flute, and all along, from the beginning of his conscious life, the persistent feeling that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being traveled by the same people at the same time, the visible people and the shadow people, and the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world,  for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being  alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.”  Auster‘throws himself in for good measure as number Archie number 4. “Only one thing was certain. One by one, the imaginary Fergusons would die, just as Artie Federman had died.  Hence the title of the book 4 3 2 1.  So ends the book.”  This final chapter ends with Archie’s no 1’s death on 9/8/71 in a house fire in Rochester.  The book ends with Nelson Rockefeller being elected VP after his disgraceful management of the Attica riots.  With a final touch of irony, Auster points out that Rockefeller, one of Archie’s potential names, was married to Happy.

A stunning achievement and now even more ironic since even Archie No. 4, i.e. Auster himself, has now died along with his three creations.  The book was even more powerful for me than for those who are younger, because the events that play out as Archie moves through life were events that shaped mine as well—JFK’s assassination, VietNam, MLK’s assassination and the riots that followed, the Kent State murders, the occupation of Columbia in 1968, and on and on as the 60’s rolled into the ’70’s and, incredibly now, into the 2025’s.

A review written in 2018 in The Guardian summarizes Auster’s accomplishment.  “What he is driving at is not only the role of contingency and the unexpected, but the “what ifs” that haunt us, the imaginary lives we hold in our minds and that run parallel to our actual existence. How might things have turned out had I gone to a different school, or had I not run into the person I married? These are the shadows of our other possible lives (and deaths). “It is a very powerful notion,” Auster believes, “and it drove me through the writing of the novel.”  The book was shortlisted for the Booker and reached #13 on the New York Times bestseller list, not bad for a 900 page doorstop sized book.

Do I recommend this book?  Not sure. It’s a mammoth achievement, but it’s a ton of work.  If you’re looking for a major undertaking, this is a worthy one, but be warned—you’ll have to take notes to keep the three different Archie’s stories straight.  For example, his father, for example, has three different lives. In one version, Stanley buys out his good-for-nothing brothers, expands to seven stores, gets rich, divorces Rose, remarries, becomes alienated from Archie, and dies on a tennis court at 54.  In another version, he dies in a fire set by his brother to pay off gambling debts.  In another, he sells his failing business and opens a small TV and radio repair shop, moves to Florida with Rose, and lives happily ever after.  Get the picture. It’s almost impossible to keep the separate stories clear, but worth the effort.  I did so with five single-spaced pages of notes, and you can, too, but this is a heavy lift.