4 3 2 1

4 3 2 1 is Paul Auster’s 2017 novel, a massive and ambitious work running to nearly nine hundred pages and the most expansive single book of his long career. The premise is simple to describe and complex to execute. Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. From that single starting point, Auster tells four parallel versions of his life, each shaped by small differences in family circumstance, accidents, and choices. The reader follows all four Fergusons simultaneously, with chapters alternating between the parallel lives.

Auster uses the four life structure to ask the kinds of questions that have occupied his fiction for decades. How much of who we become is determined by chance versus by character? What would have happened if a single early event had gone differently? What does a writer’s autobiography actually mean if any of a thousand small decisions might have produced a completely different writer? Each Ferguson moves through the same broad American historical period, including the 1960s civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, the political assassinations and cultural shifts of the era, but each Ferguson experiences these events from a different position and ends the novel as a different kind of person.

The novel is dense, demanding, and rewarding for readers who commit to the project. Auster is a writer who has always been interested in the artificial nature of fiction itself, and the four parallel Fergusons foreground that interest in a way that earlier novels like The New York Trilogy or Moon Palace only gestured at. The autobiographical material running through all four lives, drawn from Auster’s own experience growing up in postwar New Jersey, gives the novel its emotional ground.

4 3 2 1 was nominated for the Booker Prize and divided critics in productive ways. Some readers found the length excessive. Others found it the most ambitious American novel of its decade. For longtime Auster readers, it is essential. For new readers, it is a major commitment but a serious one.