Brooklyn, the Place of Recovery

Material: “The Brooklyn Follies” By Paul Auster, Picador, 2006

1.Introduction
No one knows what will happen in the future. They might lose their job, their family, possessions or their life. Someone gives up his/her dream, others get divorced and still others have fallen into neglect. When they lose someone to be with or their place to be in, they feel uneasy, lonely, isolated or excluded. They might feel like an exile in their daily lives.
In this story, every character has something missing. A man who is looking for the place to die in. A man who was imprisoned. A man who gave up his dream. A girl who is neglected by her mother. A woman who got divorced. A woman who lost her husband.
All of them need refuge to hide in like people waiting for the rain to stop in a small hut. They begin to talk about the weather, and change the topic to their family, or hobby. They may talk about something more serious and get something more concrete. However, once it stops raining, they don’t need the hut any more and go back to their own life. This story is about people who missed something and the place they gathered in.
The story begins in March 2001, just six months before the tragedy.

2.Harry Brightman
Harry Brightman is an owner of a secondhand bookstore, Brightman’s Attic. He is flamboyant homosexual. He is always talkative but never tells about his past. One day, a girl named Flora comes to the bookstore. She says she is Harry’s daughter. And she calls his father “Harry Dunkel”. Asked what it means, she answers, “It means dark,… My father is a dark man, and he lives in a dark wood. He pretends he’s a bright man now, but that’s only a trick. He’s still dark. He’ll always be dark --- right up to the day he dies.” (p.36) They are so confused because Harry’s first name is Brightman but she says it is Darkman.
After Harry persuades his daughter to go back to her hospital, he begins to talk about his past. He began his carrier as a salesclerk. After getting married to a woman, who was a daughter of a millionaire, he had his own art gallery, Dunkel Freres, which means “brothers” in French. There he found a talented young painter, Alec Smith. Harry loved him and his talent, and sold several paintings. But the painter suddenly committed suicide, leaving only a few paintings. Then the other painter appeared to Harry, named Gordon Dryer. He gave an offer to Harry that he would continue to create Smith’s work, which Harry rejected first, but accepted eventually. Harry was successful to sell Smith’s work painted by Dryer, the ghost painter. But it didn’t last long and he was put into prison for two years. After that, he moved to New York, changed his name and opened his used-book store, Brightman’s Attic. It was nine years ago.
Why did he change his name? As old Latin words “Nomen est Omen” shows, names have power to predict what they are or what they will be like. His name meant “darkness”, which drew dark men like Alec Smith and Gordon Dryer. Alec Smith committed suicide, and Harry was sent to jail by Alec’s ghost painter. Harry might regret Alec’s death and his deed. Then he decided to change his destiny. Harry changed his name after he went out of the jail, and tried to say good bye to the old life and welcome the new one. He transformed himself from a dark man to a bright man.

3.Nathan Glass
The narrator, Nathan Glass is almost 60 years old, divorced his ex-wife, sold their house, retired his job, his only daughter is already married and he got a lung cancer. He chose Brooklyn as the place to die in, where he was born. He, however, finds Brooklyn a nice place to live in and decides to write a book about Brooklynites, “The Book of Human Folly”, which would be this book “THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES”.

4.Tom Wood
Tom Wood is a nephew of Nathan. He is talented, and Nathan was sure his nephew would ascend “the academic ladder”. (p.18) However, after Tom suddenly gave up his academic carrier, and then moved to New York and began to work as a taxi driver. Then he came to know harry Brightman, whose bookstore Tom often went to as his routine. Harry asked Tom to work for his bookstore but Tom kept turning it down without knowing why. But, on one night, he knew what the name of the taxi company he worked for, 3-D, meant. He had been wondering what it meant and suddenly he hit upon an idea, which was like revelation. He thought it meant “Darkness”, “Disintegration” and “Death”. The next morning Tom told Harry to accept the offer.
Tom recognized he had been wandering in the dark, disintegrated and dead world as a taxi driver. He had given up his carrier and lost his hope. He had been struggling for a long time in the darkness. However, he was rescued from the dark world by Harry Brightman, who began his new life.

5.Brightman’s Attic
Why did the author choose the secondhand bookstore in Brooklyn as a setting? Brightman’s Attic is Harry’s secondhand bookstore, where Nathan has come to know Harry and meets Tom by chance after seven years absence. The secondhand bookstore is the place where the first life of the book ends and the second life begins. The books are waiting for the new life here for a certain period of time. They don’t know who will buy them, when they will be bought, or if they will be bought or not. But they get ready and are just still waiting for the time of the new life to begin.

6.Henry D. Thoreau & Edgar A. Poe
When Nathan is writing about the unexpected encounter with Tom at the bookstore in his book, he remembers the day when they talked about Tom’s senior thesis about Henry D. Thoreau and Edgar A. Poe. Tom says about his thesis, “It’s about nonexistent worlds... the inner refuge, a map of the place a man goes to when life in the real world is no longer possible.” (p.15) Two writers needed a refuge from the crisis in front of them. They needed a place to get “a noiseless sanctuary where the soul can at last find a measure of peace”. (p.16) Tom also says, “Both men believed that America had gone to hell, that it was being crushed to death by an ever-growing mountain of machines and money”. (p.16) It is “the Civil War”. Tom finishes his words by saying, “Four years of death and destruction. A human bloodbath generated by the very machines that were supposed to make us all happy and rich.” (p.16)

7.Conclusion
Why does the author have to insert this episode? What is he trying to say by this episode? Is it just to show how talented Tom is? Definitely no. It is to foreshadow the disaster. The disaster which would happen in the near future in New York, “generated by the very machines that were supposed to make us all happy and rich”. The attack of September 11, 2001. After this episode, Tom meets Nathan, finds his girlfriend, get married to her and they have a baby. Nathan gets his niece from a man and finds his girlfriends. Everyone is getting happy. But at the same time, they are approaching to the tragedy. Therefore, they must get prepared for it. The novel was first published in 2006. The author answers in an interview that it takes him about a year to finish writing one novel. He might have lost someone he knew in the attack. He would have gone through a lot of complex feelings like sadness, despair, anger, or agony. Eventually he conquered them and managed to write about the disaster and the people in Brooklyn. By describing a small secondhand bookstore as a refuge and people gathering there, he tries to encourage the Brooklynites to believe in chance, not to give up and cheer up them, one of whom he is. It’s a very simple message but it has the strong power which only a few people can have. The novel finishes by Nathan’s following words;

“for now it was still eight o’clock, and as I walked along the avenue under that brilliant blue sky, I was happy, my friends, as happy as any man who had ever lived.” (p.306)