The literary feature: Deus Ex Machina

In his 2003 novel ‘Where You’re At’, about the global popularity of Rap Music and Hip Hop Patrick Neate remarks that the Japanese hip-hop crowd, although on the surface appearing to be as dedicated to Hip Hop as listeners in New York City, have no depth of connection with the music. This reminds me of a book, The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. In this book the one time acclaimed writer of the New York Trilogy introduces a character Nathan, a lonely divorcee with a large amount of money after retiring from the insurance business, with a largely dysfunctional family: his daughter is currently not speaking to him, his nephew was a successful academic who burned out and now works in a used bookstore, his niece was a wild party girl who no-one has spoken to in years. Nathan has no friends and is living in a cheap flat in one of the cheaper parts of New York.

One day his niece’s daughter, a ten year old girl who refuses to speak, arrives on his doorstep, with just a note and a few clothes. Refusing to tell them anything about her mother, uncle and nephew are left in suspense alongside the reader while Nathan divides his time among taking care of the girl, having daily lunches with his nephew and writing his memoirs. The climax of the novel comes when Nathan takes the girl to live with a relative on the other side of her family who supposedly is more capable of bringing up a young girl. This comes to the end when they stop at a diner and Lucy, the niece, floods the petrol tank with cola. Finding themselves midway between there and nowhere they leave their car in the hands of a stereotypical mechanic, and head across the road to the conveniently placed, hospitable but unused bed and breakfast, where they stay until the car is fixed.

Here, the nephew meets his intellectual and physical equal in the hostelier’s daughter. After much coquetry the schoolteacher and the librarian pursue a short term relationship, and when the car is fixed the original crew return home after discovering that the brakes were entirely worn out and had the car not been repaired they would almost certainly have died. Back in the city, Nathan only then hires a private eye he knows from his insurance days to track down his vanished niece, meanwhile the school-teacher walks into the bookshop one day and pursues the relationship further. This is convenient for the high intellect of the young girl is encouraged by the academic uncle and intelligent school-teacher and Nathan pursues his vanished niece while considering an ill-fated business venture with the bookstore owner. There is a breakthrough, they find the niece living in a Jesuit colony after giving up drugs and nude-spreads in magazines but she doesn’t have a phone and her husband is highly controlling so Nathan flies across the USA to save her.

This religious sect is more concerned with being good during this life than preparing for the next and the husband quite willingly lets her go back with the uncle. Back in New York the bookstore owner dies chasing his ex-lover down the street and the estate is inherited by its two employees. Finally Nathan’s daughter contacts him; she has been in England but is eager to make amends with her estranged father. The book reaches a conclusion: Nathan is reunited with his family and shortly after finds a new woman who is easy-going and not at all stressful, his nephew with the high intellect gets back into peak physical shape under the guidance of the school-teacher, the still-beautiful niece pursues a love affair with the daughter of Nathan’s girlfriend, everyone has money, no grudges are held and the only character to die is the one the reader is supposed to be less empathetic with.

Kurt Vonnegut devised a system of how to define a good book mathematically; a sine graph is the story of someone who has nothing, goes through great tragedy and then comes back to have everything; a cosine graph is the story of someone who has everything, loses it all and then regains everything and lives happily; the third model was Kafka, a sharp decline to the infinite. For example a man wakes up, realizes he is a giant insect, therefore he can’t afford to go to work, his family loses the house and he gets killed. The sine graph is any Jane Austen novel: a bored girl comes of age, falls in love, becomes bitterly disappointed but then finds the right man for her. The cosine graph is more like a Jeffrey Archer or John Grisham novel: a man, usually, is in possession of valuable property or evidence, a crime is committed to try and deprive them of it but by the end justice is restored and in the case of John Grisham the outcome isn’t too exaggerated.

The Brooklyn Follies suffers from being inapplicable to any of these models; it is a tangent graph moving from zero upwards without ever checking in with reality. It bears similarities with Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections but without any of the tragic elements that make the comedy so enjoyable.

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