I liked Paul Auster's, The Brooklyn Follies (2006) so much that I read it twice. It was even better the second time. Even though it begins scary ("I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn…."), it's a cheerful and warm-hearted novel. Auster's gift is to make barely credible events seem commonplace and normal. So Follies packs in a mute nine-year-old girl who journeys many miles to find her uncle, and then a forger of paintings, a noir-y blackmail scheme, a wacky pseudo-Christian religious cult, a Jamaican transvestite who mouths "Can't Help Loving that Man" at a sad funeral, and so on.
The Brooklyn Follies is a comedy not because it labors at one-liners but because everyone who should get married or at least find a mate, manages to do so by the last page. Plus it's rich in Park Slope locations and lore.
I also enjoyed Colm Toibin's Brooklyn (2009), which is another version of the immigration novel. It's set back in the 1950s but the 50s might as well be the '20s as far as oppressive social customs are concerned. Although the central figure, Eilis, travels to Brooklyn, she never quite frees herself from provincial Ireland or the interventions of transatlantic priest Father Flood. Young, inexperienced, she falls hard for a boy of Italian extraction — and her doing so turns out to be more of a problem that it needs to be. Eilis must make some important, life-determining decisions, but whether she makes the right choices is left to the reader to decide (I myself think she loses her bearings). It's a lovely, understated, carefully wrought and admirable novel.
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