www.annemoore.net

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Also in the blog

Chief among my reasons to visit Montreal was to visit our son Evan, who is finishing up his last semester at McGill University, where he’s studying English literature and history. My friend Janet, whose son is in his second year at McGill, was my co-conspirator. We agreed on an early November visit: cold enough to

(...)

Finishing her umpteenth young-adult novel set during World War II, my ten-year old daughter pranced around the kitchen: “I llllllove the Holocaust.” I choked on my coffee. “You mean, the literature of the Holocaust. Hitler, the Nazis. The ultimate bad guys.” Alex agreed, then told me all about a Danish girl sent by her grandmother

(...)

I have no books to recommend. I’ve been reading, of course. I admired but didn’t love Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, which I thought would be about women’s friendships (if so, we’re doomed as a gender), but was really about neglect. Before that, I read What Maisie Knew, by Henry James, the mother of

(...)

One thought on "Books: Paul Auster’s Sunset Park"