You can't go wrong with that.Īn hour passed, then another hour. Tell them you're Rockefeller, the man said. Since English was still an alien tongue to Isaac Reznikoff in 1900, he asked his older, more experienced compatriot for a suggestion. You need an American name for your new life in America - something with a good American ring to it.

The man said to him, forget the name Reznikoff. While waiting to be interviewed by an immigration official at Ellis Island, he struck up a conversation with a fellow Russian Jew. (Reading) According to family legend, Ferguson's grandfather departed on foot from his native city of Minsk with 100 rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket, traveled west to Hamburg through Warsaw and Berlin and then booked passage on a ship called the Empress of China. So I want you to share with us - actually, this is from the very start of the - of the book - a wonderful, old Jewish joke.ĪUSTER: Yeah, the novel does begin with a joke. SIEGEL: I think people may be struck by the fact that a character born to middle-class, Jewish parents would not logically be named Ferguson. They seem able to do things at astonishingly young ages that I was not capable of doing, for example. These Fergusons are so much more precocious than I was. I think of this book as sharing my geography and sharing my chronology, but it's really not at all my story.

Is '4 3 2 1' a kind of fractured mirror that reflects different versions of Paul Auster?ĪUSTER: It's really not me at all, even though the interest of the Fergusons seemed to overlap with mine. And like more than one of them, Paris is some place special to you. SIEGEL: Like all the Archies, books and writing matter a lot to you. Like Archie Ferguson, you were born in New Jersey in 1947. That was a very precise and apt description of the book - the structure of it - so thank you for that. Paul Auster, welcome to the program once again. Auster has dealt his baby boomer protagonist four different hands and each set of cards leads Archie Ferguson to a different place by the book's end. He may go to college or not go to college. In one story, Archie's father's business thrives. In each story, Archie Ferguson's life takes a set of distinctive turns. In fact, the heroes of Auster's novel are four different Archie Fergusons, each born to the same circumstances, the same parents but each with his own story. The hero of Paul Auster's new coming-of-age novel, '4 3 2 1,' is Archie Ferguson, born in 1947 in New Jersey to middle-class, Jewish parents.

4 3 2 1 Paul Auster