Auster's novel of love and forgiveness from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven ...
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Auster's novel of love and forgiveness from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years. Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.
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Set primarily in the Sunset Park community of Brooklyn following the financial crash of 2008, Paul Auster's novel "Sunset Park" combines elements of literary bohemia with reminders of "The Diary of Anne Frank". The book features four young people in their 20s who stryggle with themselves, with their artistic or literary ambitions, and with poverty. They find themselves squatting in a ramshackle abandoned small house in Brooklyn which New York City has seized for back taxes. The four young people live in fear of the inevitable day when the city discovers their illegal presence in the house and evicts them. During the process, they struggle and perhaps thrive in spite of appearances.
Of the four squatters, the primary character is a 28 year old man named Miles Heller, a college dropout who had been working in south Florida removing property from repossessed homes. While in Florida, Miles became involved with a precocious 17 year old high school student, Pilar. Events force him to flee Florida, as he had fled his parents and college years earlier, and to accept the invitation of his old friend Bing to join him and two women in Sunset Park after Bing's girlfriend moved out. Bing runs a small repair shop called "The Hospital for Broken Things", but his primary interest in life is playing in a small jazz band.
There are two women squatters. Ellen struggles with selling real estate but her passion is art and painting. She turns from working on still lifes and buildings, where her work appears stilted, to the human body. Ellen is alone and sexually frustrated. The other woman in the house, Alice, is pursuing her PhD in English and working part town for an activist group concerned with the plight of dissident writers. Her dissertation topic is the 1946 film "The Best Years of our Lives" which deals with the problems of American servicemen returning home after WW II. The book is heavily freighted with symbolism -- with the film's suggesting something of the role that the period of squatting will play in the lives of the protagonists and the title of Bing's shop suggesting something of each of their lives.
There is also a great deal of baseball symbolism in this book using players both famous and obscure. The great promising pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, Herb Score, becomes emblematic of hard luck when his promising career ends as he is struck in the eye by a line drive. Auster also describes an obscure, undistinguished player, Jack "Lucky" Lohrke who faced three situations of almost certain death in WW II and lived to tell the tale. With baseball and bohemia the book is heavily atmospheric. It is at its best in the portrayal of the run-down neighborhoods of Brooklyn and of its struggling young people.
With all its symbolism and bohemian portraits, the book is short and a relatively fast read. It includes many characters besides the four young squatters. Most of this large group of secondary characters centers around Miles, and they include his father, who struggles to run a small publishing house, together with his stepmother, an academic, his mother, and actress, his stepbrother and his young girlfriend Pilar, the love of his life. The characters are well portrayed but the book is cluttered and has an almost dreamlike feel.
The book includes some highly poignant scenes and some beautifully lyrical writing. I was in love with much of the book and with its premise. As the book proceeds, the writing becomes overdone in places, with long, overly elaborate and mannered stringy sentences. There are also contrivances in the story line which make the book less effective. I liked the novel a great deal but was sorry my initial reaction was not fully sustained.
The novelist Siri Hustvedt, Auster's wife, suggested the phrase "the strangeness of being alive". When Ellen becomes deeply involved with the human figure the narrator of the tale observes: "She wants her human bodies to convey the miraculous strangeness of being alive -- no more than that, as much as all that. She doesn't concern herself with the idea of beauty. Beauty can take care of itself." The "strangeness of being alive", with all its enigmas, tragedy, coincidences and hope is the underlying theme of Paul Auster's novel.
Robin Friedman
Chris Roberts
Nov 15, 2010
The Dickering Paul Auster
Paul Auster's "Sunset Park:" Rather thinking a few snapshots of a run down building in Sunset Park will do, Paul Auster races back to his multi-million-dollar brownstone self-satisfied. Sitting at a table, a Miro or is it a Warhol, on the wall behind him, he sketches out a tale of the young and the disenfranchised not having spent a day living on his, keyword, "imagined" mean streets. And it shows. The novel is equal parts patronizing and clueless. His characters are pseudo young and quite a wide stretch the author most travel in going back thirty years to the reality of his youth. Don't count on a soft cover.
