Review by New York Times Review
CHARACTERS should want something in every scene, Kurt Vonnegut once advised fiction writers, even if it's only a glass of water. The idea is that yearning makes us human, and our idiosyncratic desires often get us into interesting forms of trouble. At the start of his new novel, "Sunset Park," Paul Auster merrily disregards Vonnegut 's rule, introducing Miles Heller as a man with no longings or hopes who has trained himself to want "as little as humanly possible." On the surface, "Sunset Park" is fairly straightforward, without Auster's trademark postmodern flourishes. Yet he tests the rules throughout, as if the experiment were to write a conventionally satisfying novel while bucking many of the conventions of how to write fiction. When "Sunset Park" opens, 28-year-old Miles is living in South Florida, "trashing out" foreclosed houses, getting rid of the things left behind when the residents were evicted. Unlike his thuggish colleagues, who help themselves to anything of value, he takes only photographs, "to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here." A character nostalgically driven to record the passing moment on film: this is classic Auster. But Miles has his reasons. At 21, reeling with guilt from an impulsive act that led to tragic consequences, he dropped out of Brown and hit the road, never contacting his parents. In search of Zen-like detachment, and maybe also to punish himself, he lives austerely, buying only necessities and novels - "an addiction he has no wish to be cured of." It's a novel that leads him into conversation with a girl at a park. While they happen to be reading the same edition of "The Great Gatsby," she looks like Lolita, "a small adolescent girl wearing tight, cut-off shorts, sandals and a skimpy halter top." But this girl, Pilar, is no ordinary nymphet. She informs Miles that her favorite character in "Gatsby" is the narrator, Nick Carraway, arguing that while the other characters are lost and shallow, his compassion helps us to understand and feel for them. "If the story had been told by an omniscient narrator," she concludes, "it wouldn't work half as well as it does." This is a provocative observation, appearing as it does in a novel told by an omniscient narrator and full of lost characters. Not long after Miles and Pilar strike up a romance (so much for not wanting anything) she moves in with him. Conveniently, she's recently orphaned. But Miles still fears that someone will spot them together and turn him in for statutory rape, so he drops her off a few blocks from her high school every morning. While this may sound scandalous, Auster practically sterilizes their relationship in his attempt to legitimize it. Pilar is extraordinarily bright and intellectually curious, with brilliant SAT scores and essays that need not one correction. And Miles is unfailingly solicitous as he sets her on a path toward a brighter future than she'd envisioned. Even in bed, he is far from predatory. Pilar fears getting pregnant, and establishes that "the mommy hole was off limits . . . forbidden to male members." Miles accepts her terms without qualm. "Such are the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of their love life, which is nevertheless a rich love life, a splendid erotic partnership that shows no signs of abating anytime soon." Only the most prudish reader could find this relationship objectionable. The problem is, it doesn't seem fully real, either. Defying another rule of fiction, "Sunset Park" is written mostly in summary, large chunks of exposition in which we are told exactly what each character is thinking, feeling, facing. Deprived of scenes, we seldom see the characters interact without the narrator's filter, and so we can't form our own impressions. "Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back. . . . Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls." These pronouncements leave little room for ambiguity, and everything that happens corroborates this report. When Miles's father finally meets Pilar, she wows him with her understanding of quantum physics. There is nothing inherently wrong with a love story between a man and a girl. All good love stories have impediments. Unfortunately, Auster overcompensates for potential misgivings, making Miles and Pilar too good to be true. But Miles's intentions are pure, the law is literal. Pilar has a petty older sister who issues a real threat. When an old friend lets him know of a room in a Brooklyn squat, he decides to hide there, waiting for Pilar to turn 18. The narrative transports us to the Sunset Park neighborhood of the title. Chapters set there elaborate Miles's story and those of his three housemates, all of them living rent-free, if not quite off the grid (in another convenient happen-stance, the city has not shut off their utilities), in an abandoned house near Green-Wood Cemetery. There is a young man who repairs typewriters and rotary phones in a storefront called the Hospital for Broken Things; a woman working on a dissertation about late 1940s crime novels and cinema; and a visual artist with a history of mental illness. The housemates have mostly amicable interactions, to the extent that they interact at all. AUSTER continues to write mostly in summary, and his omniscient narrator clearly cares for these new characters as well, never letting them fall too far. One woman frets that she is too fat, but loses weight and feels better; the other wants to make out with nearly everyone she sees, but channels the urge into erotic drawings. Miles's old friend becomes infatuated with him, and worries that he might be gay, but a limp tryst with another man reassures him that Miles is special. Miles is the common thread among these characters, and it sometimes seems a thin one, as their stories barely overlap. "Sunset Park" has a scrapbook feel that may leave readers unsure what the book is really about, a question that applies to conceptual novels as much as to conventional ones. Still, Auster consistently brings to the page interesting people, possessed by esoteric fixations and driven to express their ideas in creative ways. He's right that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster's renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In "Sunset Park," he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident (and new Nobel Peace Prize winner) Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie "The Best Years of Our Lives." Yet if Auster can't escape his own fixations - if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away - maybe that's because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark. 'Such are the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of their love life, which is nevertheless . . . a splendid erotic partnership.' Malena Watrous is the author of the novel "If You Follow Me."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 26, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Passionately literary, Auster nonetheless publishes as frequently as a genre author, writing poetic and brainy feigned procedurals featuring inadvertent outlaws. In his sixteenth novel, four flat-broke twentysomething searchers end up squatting in a funky abandoned house in Sunset Park, a rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Bing, the sloppy bear ringleader, plays drums and runs the Hospital for Broken Things, where he mends relics from a thriftier past. Melancholy artist Ellen is beset by erotic visions. Grad student Alice is researching pop-culture depictions of postwar sexual relationships. Miles is a fugitive. Poisoned by guilt over his stepbrother's death, he hasn't communicated with his loving father, a heroic independent publisher; his kind English professor stepmother; or his flamboyant actor mother for seven years. Lately he's been in Florida, trashing out foreclosed homes, stunned by what evicted people leave behind in anger and despair. Miles returns to New York after things turn dicey over his love affair with a wise-beyond-her-years Cuban American teenager. As always with the entrancing and ambushing Auster, every element is saturated with implication as each wounded, questing character's story illuminates our tragic flaws and profound need for connection, coherence, and beauty. In a time of daunting crises and change, Auster reminds us of lasting things, of love, art, and the miraculous strangeness of being alive. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Auster's dry, gravelly voice has a gravitas all its own. He reads his novel about Miles Heller, hiding out from the authorities in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood, interspersed with discursions on film and baseball, fate and chance. While Auster should intuitively knows the rhythms of his own work, his reading can be oddly choppy; he occasionally comes down too hard on the wrong word. Still his voice is enough to convey a sense of the writer. One almost feels that Auster is himself an Auster character, blowing smoke rings in an empty room while pondering America's mysteries and minutiae. A Holt hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Miles Heller is an anomaly, a 28-year-old college dropout who has pared his life down to bare essentials, eschewing the ostentatious trappings of his generation and splurging only on books. Miles earns a living "trashing out" repossessed homes in south Florida, snapping disturbing photos of the detritus left behind by the newly homeless. When he falls for Pilar Sanchez, a precocious 17-year-old, Miles realizes that his day-to-day existence of few desires or needs is over. Anxious for Pilar to be of legal age to marry, he returns home to New York hoping to repair the seven-year rift with his family caused by the burden of guilt he has carried since an accident that killed his stepbrother. Miles begins to reinvent himself, squatting in an abandoned house in Brooklyn with a crew of intriguing characters: Alice, a doctoral candidate whose work at PEN frustrates her; Ellen, a lonely artist; and Bing, a brooding presence whose mood swings presage the incident that may ruin their future plans. Verdict The author deftly balances minute details that evoke New York City, post-financial meltdown, with marvelously drawn characters bruised but unbowed by life's vicissitudes; think Richard Russo or Anne Tyler. Auster has an impressive array of literary nominations to his credit (e.g., PEN/Faulkner, IMPAC Dublin, and Edgar), but this should be the novel that brings him a broader readership. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
With a plot that encompasses war in the Middle East, economic recession and the perils of the publishing industry, a contemporary vitality distinguishes the latest from the veteran author.In many respects this novel bears the thematic imprint of Auster (Invisible, 2009, etc.)chance, coincidence and "the imponderables of fate, the strangeness of life, the what-ifs and might-have-beens." Yet the literary gamesmanship of his metafictional narratives is less evident here, as the critical challenges of these times leave both the characters and the author with more at stake. The plot pivots around Miles Heller, son of an independent publisher and a well-known actress who divorced early in his childhood. After his stepbrother suffers a fatal accident, Miles can't shake the guilt he feels over his possible complicity and the suspicions of his stepmother, so he abandons his studies, cutting all ties with his family. A chance romance with a much younger girl returns him to New York, where he finds shelter in an abandoned building that has become something of an artist's colony. The plot unfolds from various perspectives, amid insecurities both economic and psychological, as details from the mid-1940s film The Best Years of Our Life provide cinematic counterpoint. Though one character muses that "the dark time will soon be over, and all will be forgiven," the novel's tragic foreshadowing doesn't promise a happily-ever-after ending.Sure to please Auster fans and likely to attract new readers as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
