A masterpiece. (Daily Mail)
Absorbing and immersive . . . the author's greatest novel . . . showing that he can out-Roth, out-Updike and out-Franzen the greatest as a richly textured chronicler of modern America in flux, in transit and in crisis . . . The postmodern epic has never felt so much like an addictive long-form TV serial. (Financial Times)
Remarkable . . . A novel that contains multitudes. (New York Times)
A vast portrait of the turbulent mid-20th century . . . wonderfully, vividly conveyed. (New Statesman)
Ingenious . . . 4 3 2 1 reads like a big social drama . . . while offering the philosophical exploration of one man's fate. (Esquire)
An epic home-run. (Spectator)
Ambitious and sprawling . . . Immersive . . . Auster has a startling ability to report the world in novel ways. (USA Today)
The cold war, the execution of the Rosenbergs, JFK, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam draft, the My Lai massacre, the Kent State shootings: here's a novel as attentive to period detail as Philip Roth would be, or Richard Ford, or Jonathan Franzen. The new expansiveness is reflected in the sentences, which run on, fluent, self-delighting, reluctant to stop. And the relationship between the private and public is neatly evoked through the image of concentric circles, with the world (and war) on the outer rim and the individual (and his battles) a small dot at the centre. --(Blake Morrison Guardian)
4 3 2 1 fizzes with the sheer pleasure of a writer routinely praised or censured as a coterie puzzler, an existentialist dandy, showing the he can out-Roth, out-Updike and out-Franzen the greatest as a richly textured chronicler of modern America in flux, in transit and in crisis. The postmodern epic has never felt so much like an addictive long-form TV serial. --(Boyd Tonkin Financial Times)
'For the information-hungry parent:A Dickensian romp with a modernist twist 4321 looks at the road less travelled, and what might happen if we followed each path.' --(ELLE Gift Guide)