There is a delightful moment in this novel when Nathan, the narrator, is standing on one side of the street with his nephew, Tom, and they see Nancy Mazzucchelli on the other side. Tom thinks of her as the BPM, the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and he would never dare approach. Nathan simply walks over and starts talking to her. Characters do things like this in Auster novels — they assert themselves over destiny with clear logic and sunny optimism; they know what they want for lunch and they ask for it. The moment is delightful, however, because what animates Auster’s work is the unexpected. The reader knows that Nathan’s action will alter the sequence of events, but he knows too that other events will intervene to make the consequences quite different from what the protagonists anticipate.
Divorced and retired, Nathan has come to Brooklyn ‘looking for a quiet place to die’.
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