The four versions of Ferguson’s early life are so similar that the reader has to struggle to keep one separate from the next. In each retelling, the family lives in a different (but almost identical) New Jersey suburb - Montclair, West Orange, Millburn or Maplewood.

In all four versions, he’s the only child of Rose Adler - sometimes she’s a photographer, sometimes a stay-at-home wife and mother - and Stanley Ferguson, an industrious, uncommunicative man who owns either a single appliance store called 3 Brothers Home World or a chain of appliance stores called Ferguson’s. Auster opts for a more leisurely and earthbound form of storytelling, taking a hundred pages to sketch the outlines of Ferguson’s alternate boyhoods. In “Life After Life,” Atkinson launches her novel with an actual bang - an assassination attempt on Hitler, no less - and follows it in quick succession with a stillbirth, a drowning and a fatal fall from a building, immediately establishing a fast-paced atmosphere of danger and unpredictability. The virtues of this unwieldy strategy take a while to announce themselves. What makes “4 3 2 1” original and dauntingly complex is that Auster sets all four of his stories on parallel tracks and tells them more or less simultaneously, giving us four versions of Chapter 1 (1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4), followed by four versions of Chapter 2 (2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4) and so on. Unlike Atkinson, who jumps around in time with mischievous pleasure, Auster sticks to chronological order, proceeding methodically from Ferguson’s childhood to his early 20s, focusing on fairly conventional coming-of-age subjects: family, friends, school, sports, sex and politics. Paul Auster ventures into similar territory in “4 3 2 1,” an epic bildungsroman that presents the reader with four versions of the formative years of Archie Ferguson, a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947 (the origin of his unlikely surname is explained in the novel’s opening paragraph). It’s an exhilarating experiment, liberating both writer and reader from the unforgiving linear logic of realistic narrative while posing intriguing questions about fate, identity and the power of individuals to control their own lives.

The story keeps looping back on itself like a video game, giving the protagonist another chance to get things right, or at least explore alternate avenues of possibility. When Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” was published in 2013, it felt like something new, a wildly inventive historical novel in which the main character dies repeatedly, only to get resurrected under different circumstances.

4 3 2 1 by paul auster