Rather, Ferguson will live out four parallel lives – a quartet of Bildungsromans: ‘Four different boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances. The first graphic novel in the series contains two. His grandson, known simply as Ferguson, is born into a postwar America ripe with possibility, so ripe that a single lifetime will not suffice. Owly is a kind, yet lonely, little owl whos always on the lookout for new friends and adventure. In the administrative fluster of Ellis Island, a Russian Jew is comically renamed in the immigration queue. The question is whether 4321, seven years in the making, is excellent or simply enormous. When a novel is as thick as it is tall, size is assumed to be a corollary for ambition. At almost 900 pages, the sheer physical heft of it is impossible to ignore. We have googly eyes for gargantuan statements.’ Paul Auster’s long-awaited novel, 4321, is a gargantuan statement. The American critic Adam Gopnik writes: ‘Nothing is more American than our will to make the enormous do the work of the excellent.
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