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Books: Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

More book grief!

Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” grabbed me from its first sentence. “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.”

He is Miles Heller, an Ivy League drop-out working foreclosures in Florida, inspecting abandoned homes for banks. He finds himself cataloguing, via photographs, the things people have left behind: lipstick, rifles, tennis racquets, flat-screen televisions. Unlike his coworkers, Miles doesn’t steal.

A native New Yorker, he’s been in Florida long enough to regard the sun as an unrelenting curse instead of a warm blessing. Reading “The Great Gatsby” in the park one day he spots a pretty girl reading the same book. They fall in love. But there’s a problem: she’s 17, a high school senior. An orphan, her three sisters demand pricey abandoned goods in exchange for their not-of-age sister. When Miles refuses, thugs beat him up, sending him back to New York, where he’ll wait the six months for Pilar to turn 18.

Kind, smart, decent, loving: why did Miles drop out of school? Why did he flee his parents’ comfortable Greenwich Village home seven years ago? Those answers are heartbreaking.

In New York, Miles moves in with high school friend Bing Nathan, who’s house squatting in Sunset Park, a tired Brooklyn neighborhood.

We get to know Bing and his two women roommates intimately. Ditto Miles’ estranged father, stepmother and mother — their disappointments and desires, their frustrations and triumphs. I didn’t want to leave any of them.

Indeed, my only complaint is this book’s abbreviated length. Auster tells when he could show: Pilar’s visit to New York, Ellen’s charming reunion with her teen-age love, Bing’s seduction of Alice’s boyfriend.

Like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” this is a story of contemporary America and its families, how they fall apart and come back together. A magnificent read.

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