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35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Auster in top form, October 13, 2010
This review is from: Sunset Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
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Reading a Paul Auster novel is something like listening to a well-orchestrated , multi-layered musical composition where certain melodies and motifs recur with substantial elaboration and variation. He is one of our very best writers and his newest, Sunset Park, like many of his books, reflects back to us a great deal about how we live today. It is "up-to-the-moment" current, the protagonist, Miles Heller, being employed by a South Florida realty company (for part of the novel) as a "trash-out" worker who cleans out repossessed homes that are usually left in awful shape by their former inhabitants. Miles has a somewhat fetishistic compulsion to photograph the forgotten possessions, the abandoned things that have been left behind, and his large collection of digital photos of these objects comprise one of the many lists of contemporary artifacts that Auster constructs throughout the book. It includes pictures of "books, shoes, and oil paintings, pianos and toasters, dolls, tea sets and dirty socks, televisions and board games, party dresses and tennis racquets, sofas, silk lingerie, caulking guns, thumbtacks, plastic action figures, tubes of lipstick, rifles, discolored mattresses, knives and forks, poker chips, a stamp collection, and a dead canary lying at the bottom of its cage."
Miles is 28 years old, and one day while sitting on the grass in a public park, reading The Great Gatsby (one of many iconic American cultural landmarks referenced in the book) he meets Pilar Sanchez, who happens to be reading the same novel. That bond connects them immediately, but there's one hitch to that connection. Pilar, though lovely, smart, and irresistible, is seventeen years old. That doesn't slow down Miles at all; he falls deeply in love with her. Both have experienced deep tragedies in their lives; Miles' older brother Bobby was accidently killed by a car when Miles shoved him into the road while the two were walking together. Pilar's parents were both killed in an auto accident as well. She lives with her three sisters, one of whom tries to blackmail Miles into giving her some of the merchandise he gathers from repossessed houses. She threatens to call the police and tell them he is committing statutory rape with her sister regularly.
The plot, as they say, thickens. Miles returns to the Sunset Park in Brooklyn where he lived some time ago before becoming estranged from his father and stepmother. Because he is without a regular job and intends to return to Florida after Pilar turns eighteen, he moves in with some friends who are "squatting" in a condemned building in the area: Bing Nathan, Alice Bergstrom, Ellen Brice and Jake Baum, and the remainder of the book is about the intersecting relationships between these five people, as well as Miles' lingering resentments regarding his parents and stepmother. You will notice virtually all the characters have names that evoke various American figures, both fictional and real. And in addition, additional American motifs that touch down again and again in the book include Miles' fascination with baseball lore, particularly Herb Score, the Cleveland Indian left hander whose career was shattered with Yankee shortsop Gil MacDougald hit a line drive that shattered multiple bones in his face, and Mark "the Bird" Fydrich, the Detroit Tiger 1976 Rookie of the Year pitcher who became famous for his virtually perpetual motion on the mound.
Then there are continuing references to a classic American film of the late 40s, The Best Years of our Lives, because one of Miles' housemates, Alice, is writing a PhD dissertation on the film. The film's ironic title and many of its remarkably delineated details, resonates as Miles and his friends struggle to live the "best years of their lives" in what are the worst years of the life of their country, As another great novelist wrote in another great tale of two cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." While the novel's ending seems hurried and somewhat inconclusive, you can chalk up another brilliant performance by Auster and you will not want to miss this book.
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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good writing but disjointed, lacking intrigue, October 8, 2010
This review is from: Sunset Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
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I have read nearly every book by Auster since I first read The New York Trilogy in the 90s. Sunset Park has a different intent, being less experimental, and shouldn't be judged in the same category. It is a straight forward narrative written from the point of view of four misfits trying to find themselves while squatting in an abandoned house in New York City. Which sounds intriguing but Auster ultimately gives us nothing we couldn't easily foresee. The ultimate resolution of the fratricidal disaster described in the first few chapters resolves itself without surprises.
There are more sexual insights into the characters than in previous Auster novels. If such details elaborated and defined the narrative I could see his point for including them. But in this case it adds a seedy undertone that makes the reader feel more a party to gossip than a participant in an illuminating narrative. At one point a character who is a publisher toys briefly with the idea of publishing an artist's raunchy portfolio as a ploy to attract readers. I couldn't help wondering if Auster succumbed to the same subterfuge. Auster is a great writer. His work doesn't need such artless stimulants to boost sales.
On the plus side Auster gives brief but interesting views into the publishing world, the motivations of PEN and their work for Liu Xiaobo, as well as insights into the writer's life. Conversely he writes engagingly about baseball. It is these unconventional contrasts I enjoy most about Auster's work. The writing, as always, is excellent and despite its flaws is an effortless read.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is luck random or within our control?, November 9, 2010
This review is from: Sunset Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
Paul Auster is one of my favorite writers; he always able to paint his characters with taut, finely detailed, yet propulsive brush strokes. And in Sunset Park, he does not disappoint.
This novel is less postmodern than his recent book Invisible. It focuses on debris: physical debris from trashed-out foreclosed homes in Florida that Miles Heller, a Brown University dropout, rescues through his camera lens. And mental debris that Miles wrestles with after a spontaneous action on his part results in an accidental death, causing him to flee from his New York family and live in self-imposed exile down south. A chance encounter with a high school student, Cuban-American Pilar Sanchez, while reading The Great Gatsby brings fleeting connection into his life for a few happy months. But Pilar is underage and he is soon forced to flee north to avoid family charges that could lead to jail time.
As a result of his return northbound trek, Miles moves in with the other characters that populate this book: four flat-broke twentysomethings who are struggling with issues of personal identity and past failures. Together, they illegally squat in an abandoned house in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, openly evading the government and awaiting the day when eviction will become a reality. Each has placed his or her life on hold while forestalling a crucial decision. In Miles case, he is awaiting the right time connect again with his father Morris, an independent publisher who is fighting the dissolution of both his business and marriage and has never quite given up that his son will eventually find his way back home.
The fractured narrative, told sequentially in the third-person POV, weaves together a number of elements: the economic recession and ensuring foreclosure crisis, baseball trivia including Jack Lohrke ("Lucky") who cheated death repeatedly until the very end, William Wyler's 1946 coming-home classic The Best Years of Our Lives, the demise of the literary publishing houses, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the Hospital of Broken Things, which repairs artifacts of a world that once was. This seemingly haphazard assortment is not quite so haphazard on second glance: all are centered on one's ability to out-cheat fate and assume control of one's own destiny...or not. The themes that Auster has explored in the past - chance encounters, tragic flaws and past events, art and solitude, a rebellion and penance - are all here again.
James Wood, the esteemed New Yorker critic, called Auster's prose "comfortingly artificial." With the exception of a few passages that I found to be inorganically graphic, I don't agree. As these disparate elements come together at the end; the power took my breath away in ways that no artificial construct ever could.
In essence, Auster is asking: "Is luck random or is it within our control? How much responsibility can we take for occurrences? What does self-forgiveness entail? Is it worth hoping for a future when there may be no future? Should we live for the passing moment or take a bigger picture into consideration? These questions - perfectly posed for today's tough economic times and daunting crises -- will have you ruminating long after you read the last pages.
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