You’re almost 60 years old, and your wife wants a divorce. Your health isn’t exactly great thanks to the cancer you just beat back and it seem clear that your daughter–your only child–doesn’t like you very much.

What do you do with the rest of your life?

That’s the fundamental question answered in Paul Auster’s novel “The Brooklyn Follies.” This is the second Auster novel on my bookshelf, after reading “The Book of Illusions” in 2008. My thoughts on that title here.

“Brooklyn Follies” shows how you can make the decision to dust yourself off, cast aside all of the negative aspects of your life and resolve to basically start over. The main character, Nathan, goes back to Brooklyn, the place where he grew up, and rebuilds his life one lunch and one project at a time.

The beauty of Auster’s writing is the ability to start with a relatively simple cast of characters and bring out their complexity one by one. He’s then able to meld them together, amplifying those character traits in a way that wasn’t apparent on their own. When a new player enters the scene, there’s a sort of mystery novel element to each one, giving you the feeling that no matter how small their role now you know they are going to play a part in the larger story later on.

My favorite example in this book is a young girl, Nathan’s great-niece. Early on you learn her mother is not exactly in the reliable department, foreshadowing a time when the mother’s decisions eventually force her to send the girl to her uncle (Nathan’s nephew, the mother’s brother). The girl, Lucy, is incredibly smart but suffers all kinds of issues from growing up in a less-than-stellar home environment. But she has quirks that you can’t help but laugh at sometimes.

Her mother tells the story of when Lucy was in daycare, and the teacher called her mother with a concern: “When it came time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she’d take one herself. The teacher didn’t understand. Go get your milk, she’d say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn’t know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers.”

You can clearly see that scene playing out, the little girl leaning against the wall trying not to be noticed. Her eyes are wide as she slowly watches the milk cartons disappearing. She looks down and shuffles her feet, trying to act casually indifferent as the worry rages inside her. As the last kid in line approaches the carton she slips in behind him, ready to claim her milk and give a sigh of relief as another day in a system she doesn’t understand passes by.

Nathan has a friendship with a rare book dealer for whom his nephew works. The nephew is a grad-school dropout who was studying literature and thus knows tons of random stories about authors. He tells one about Franz Kafka going to a park where he finds a young girl who is upset about losing a doll. He tells the girl that the doll went on a trip, which he knows because the doll gave him a letter. The girl asks to see it, and he tells her he left it at home but will bring it to her. Kafka goes home and composes a letter, from the point of view of a doll, and gives it to her. He writes one every day for three weeks, slowly separating the doll from the girl’s life until she’s no longer sad the doll has moved on.

One reason I’m reading less so far this year is that I have been spending time on a writing project of my own, one that involves composing letters from a fictional person who also happens to be female. It’s a really interesting challenge to write outside of your “voice” especially when you are putting yourself in a perspective completely opposite of your life experience.

A last interesting tidbit from Auster’s story. One of Nathan’s last ideas in the book is to create a service for “regular” people to commission their own biographies. If you’re famous, it’s not hard to get someone to write about you. If you’re famous enough, hundreds of writers will take on your life story. His idea is to create a sort of insurance where you pay a small amount each month and at the end of your life your relatives get a book about you.

I wasn’t near the Internet when I finished the book so I couldn’t look to see if this kind of service actually exists, since it seems like a pretty logical enterprise. Today I spent about seven seconds on Google and found that for roughly $15,000 this British company will write a biography about anyone. Not sure if they’ll travel to the United States.