Excerpt from The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The boy was so smart, so articulate, so well-read, that I felt honored to count myself as a member of his family. The Woods had been through their fair share of turmoil in recent years, but Tom seemed to have weathered the calamity of his parents' breakup—as well as the adolescent storms of his younger sister, who had rebelled against her mother's second marriage and run away from home at seventeen—with a sober, reflective, rather bemused attitude toward life, and I admired him for having kept his feet so firmly on the ground. He had little or no connection with his father, who had promptly moved to California after the divorce and taken a job with the Los Angeles Times, and much like his sister (though in far more muted form) felt no great fondness or respect for June's second husband. He and his mother were close, however, and they had lived through the drama of Aurora's disappearance as equal partners, suffering through the same despairs and hopes, the same grim expectations, the same never-ending anxieties. Rory had been one of the funniest, most fetching little girls I have ever known: a whirlwind of sass and bravura, a wiseacre, an inexhaustible engine of spontaneity and mischief. From the time she was two or three, Edith and I had always referred to her as the Laughing Girl, and she had grown up in the Wood household as the family entertainer, an ever more artful and rambunctious clown. Tom was just two years older than she was, but he had always looked out for her, and once their father left the picture, his mere presence had served as a stabilizing force in her life. But then he went off to college, and Rory went out of control—first escaping to New York, and then, after a brief reconciliation with her mother, vanishing into parts unknown. At the time of that celebratory dinner for Tom's graduation, she had already given birth to an out-of-wedlock child (a girl named Lucy), had returned home just long enough to dump the baby in my sister's lap, and had vanished again. When June died fourteen months later, Tom informed me at the funeral that Aurora had recently come back to reclaim the child—and had left again after two days. She didn't show up for her mother's burial service. Maybe she would have come, Tom said, but no one had known how or where to contact her.

In spite of these family messes, and in spite of losing his mother when he was only twenty-three, I never doubted that Tom would flourish in the world. He had too much going for him to fail, was too solid a character to be thrown off course by the unpredictable winds of sorrow and bad luck. At his mother's funeral, he had walked around in a dazed stupor, overwhelmed by grief. I probably should have talked to him more, but I was too stunned and shaken myself to offer him much of anything. A few hugs, a few shared tears, but that was the extent of it. Then he returned to Ann Arbor, and we fell out of touch. I mostly blame myself, but Tom was old enough to have taken the initiative, and he could have sent me a word whenever he'd chosen to. Or, if not me, then his first cousin, Rachel, who was also in the Midwest at the time, doing her postgraduate work in Chicago. They had known each other since infancy and had always gotten along well, but he made no move in her direction either. Every now and then, I felt a small twinge of guilt as the years passed, but I was going through a rough patch of my own (marriage problems, health problems, money problems), and I was too distracted to think about him very much. Whenever I did, I imagined him forging ahead with his studies, systematically advancing his career as he scaled the academic ladder. By the spring of 2000, I was certain he had landed a job at some prestigious place like Berkeley or Columbia—a young intellectual star already at work on his second or third book.

From The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. Copyright Paul Auster 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Henry Holt.