sunset park' by paul auster, plus one

‘Sunset Park’ by Paul Auster, Plus One

Paul Auster is one of my literary heroes and remains so even after this novel. He is a

writer whose every sentence drives the narrative forward, who delivers up vivid

characters in just a few sentences, who can write convincing dialogue without quotation

marks or “he saids,” “she saids,” and who writes

with purpose. Every book is masterful and worthy

of careful study. There’s a puzzle in each one; each

is as enigmatic as ‘Book of Illusions.’1 Mastery, I

guess, is what happens when you’ve been at it for

four decades.

I think ‘Sunset Park’ is not his best work, but that’s

not to say it’s not good. I’ve learned that there’s

always much more than meets the eye in an Auster

novel and I’d fault myself for being obtuse before I

spoke ill of his work. His dissection of the movie,

‘The Best Years of Our Lives,’ the classic 1946 story

of three men returning home from war, is brilliant

and insightful. That alone is good reason to read ‘Sunset Park.’ By coincidence, I had

just seen this classic film, so it was fresh in my mind.

‘Sunset Park’ opens with Miles Heller, a 27-year-old man working in Florida on a

‘trashout’ crew—men hired to clear out foreclosed, abandoned homes of whatever its

former occupants left behind. Mostly, it’s broken toys, trash bags and burned out pots

left on the stove; but occasionally it’s computers, DVD players and flat screen TVs.

Sometimes the houses look like the occupants just walked away from a half-eaten

breakfast; more often they are trashed by the owners—missing stoves, sinks, and stripped

of wiring and copper pipes. Miles takes lots of pictures of what he finds, although he

can’t say exactly why. Maybe they hold the key to the lives lived there, a symbolic

connection to the life he left behind in New York City seven years earlier.

1 This is the title of an earlier book. See my earlier post of Paul Auster’s book ‘Invisible.’ 'Invisible' Review

© Paul Schlieben - 1 - synaptia.blogspot.com

http://synaptia.blogspot.com/2010/01/invisible-by-paul-auster.html

Reading an old copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the park on his day off, he meets and falls

in love with a young Cuban-American high school student, Pilar Sanchez. Sitting on a

blanket nearby, Pilar catches his eye and laughs, pointing at her book jacket, gesturing

that they are both reading the same book. And, so, a relationship begins. We soon learn

that Pilar’s parents are dead, killed in a car crash, and she lives with three older sisters.

As we’ll soon discover, the oldest, Angela, is trouble. Eventually, Pilar moves into

Miles’s apartment and Miles, realizing how incredibly smart Pilar is, tutors her and

encourages her to apply to several northeastern colleges. He is confident she could win a

scholarship.

There are just two problems; Pilar is underage and her oldest sister, Angela, dislikes

Miles or, at least, takes a predatory interest in him. Angela works as a cocktail waitress

and, according to Pilar, “sometimes sleeps with customers for money.” Sensing an

opportunity to blackmail Miles, Angela pulls him aside after a dinner with the family and

confronts him with the fact that Pilar is underage – “one call to the cops and your toast,

my friend” – and demands he deliver to Angela the trash-out plunder for her and her

associates to fence. At first, feeling trapped, Miles complies, delivering a flat screen TV

and a few other things, but eventually, he refuses. One morning, as he was leaving for

work, Angela’s friends corner him, punching him, “a cannonball of a punch” hard in the

stomach to make clear they will be less gentle if he continues to refuse. Miles decides his

only recourse is to leave Florida until Pilar turns eighteen, about five months from now.

He gives Pilar most of his savings to cover her expenses so she can remain in the

apartment until she turns eighteen and graduates from high school, at which time it will

be safe for Miles to return. Miles retreats to Brooklyn.

Back-story. Miles Heller is the son of a New York publisher, Morris. Morris Heller,

now in his early 60s, started Heller Publishing at a time when it was possible to discover

and publish unknown writers. Morris owes much of his success to his father, who put up

the money to start his business, and to those few writers he discovered years earlier—

writers whose most productive years now are behind them, not necessarily because of

diminished talent, just the inevitable consequence of growing old. (Does Auster identify

with these men?)


Miles’s mother, Mary-Lee Swann, having sensed that motherhood would be the end of a

promising acting career, left Miles and his father shortly after he is born. Since then, she

achieved fame on stage and film. Contact is intermittent but not embittered. Two years

after she abandoned them, Miles’s father married Willa Parks, an English professor.

Willa was married before and has a son, Bobby, about Miles’s age. When they were in

high school, Bobby was hit and killed by a car while walking on a mountain road.

Bobby, happy-go-lucky and careless, had run out of gas. The boys argued and Miles,

exasperated, pushed Bobby. The circumstances of Bobby’s death lead, circuitously, to

Miles flight four years later at the end of his third year at Brown. Miles, “…still can’t

decide if he is guilty of a crime or not.” (Auster’s ambiguous framing of Bobby’s death –

Bobby’s lackadaisical attitude, the polar opposite of Miles’s; a typical step-brotherly

love-hate relationship; Mile’s irritation leading up to the death; the coincidence of a car

barreling down a mountain road at just the wrong instant; and for Miles, “… what is

important … is to know if he heard the car coming toward them or not …” – are all pure

Paul Auster. I can’t imagine a book of his that didn’t place the reader on the knife-edge

of ambiguity.) However, as much as it affected him, it wasn’t the accident itself that sent

Miles wandering, it was overhearing years afterwards his parent’s fraught conversation

about him and the guilt this evinced.

Leaving no word of his whereabouts and, now, gone for more than seven years, Miles

maintains a correspondence only with an old New York high school friend, Bing Nathan.

Miles travels to the ski slopes of New Hampshire, to Chicago, to California and

eventually to Florida, where we first meet him working on the trash-out team.

The trash-out theme re-emerges later in the book in a more brutal form, but not before we

meet several interesting characters, each deserving one or more chapters of their own.

There’s Bing Nathan, “the only person who has known [Miles’s] various addresses over

the years…,” and, who, without Miles knowing it, shared the letters with Miles’s father,

Morris. Oversized and flabby, an anarchist and sometimes member of a band called

‘Mob Rule,” Bing is the proprietor for the past three years of a tiny fixit shop in Brooklyn

called the “The Hospital for Broken Things.” Bing abhors modern technology and


among the things he fixes are old manual typewriters favored by a few writers who live

nearby.

Then there’s Ellen Brice, an artist who, during the course of the novel, gravitates towards

drawing highly erotic images. Temporarily at least, Ellen is seriously miscast in life as a

Brooklyn real estate agent who, while showing Bing cheep Brooklyn apartments, steers

him to an abandoned house – a dilapidated shack really – on a street facing Green-Wood

Cemetery (later referred to as a “vast necropolis”) in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.

As if to confirm her own disaffection with Real Estate, when Bing decides to take over

the abandoned house, “… like no other house he has seen in New York,” Ellen becomes

one of Bing’s three housemates. Ellen has suffered emotional instability, but “doesn’t

want to go back on medication. Taking one of the pills is like swallowing a small dose of

death…”

Then there’s Alice Bergstrom, a doctoral student who recently left a job as adjunct at

Queens College “teaching remedial and freshman English” at lower wages then if she

worked at a car wash. Now, living rent-free in the Sunset Park squat and working just

fifteen hours a week for a non-profit called PEN (more about that later), Alice is able to

devote more time to her thesis on “…the relations and conflicts between men and women

as shown in books and films from 1945-1947…” (It is at this point that Auster works in

his analysis of the film ‘The Best Years of Our Lives.’) Alice is visited intermittently,

and at lengthening intervals, by her occasional, self-absorbed boyfriend, Jake Baum, an

unappreciated writer of short stories who is drifting towards the realization that it isn’t

woman who interest him most.

Millie Grant, housemate number four, has a relationship of sorts with Bing and then,

inexplicably departs, thus making way for Miles, who, responding to Bing’s entreaties,

joins the Sunset Park squat, which he views as a inexpensive, temporary alternative to

paying New York rents or getting beat up or murdered by Angela’s friends in Florida.

But, there’s a flaw in their thinking. They all are certain that the overworked staff of the

city housing department, which acquired the house after its owner defaulted on taxes, are

stretched thin and have forgotten about a worthless, rundown house in Sunset Park. What


Bing and company didn’t count on is just how far a senseless spirit of vindictiveness will

carry even the most overworked city agency when abetted by two violence-prone

policemen.

Miles hasn’t contacted his father or mother for seven years. Transformed and

emboldened by his love for Pilar, Miles decides to comes to terms with the past and

contact his parents; his California mother temporarily in New York appearing in an off-

Broadway play, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’2; his father at home in New York, but in

and out, making frequent, unplanned trips to London, where his wife, Willa, who has

become very ill, has been teaching a semester long class.

Of course, the central event here – the one that sets everything else in motion – is

Bobby’s death and Miles’s unresolved guilt. That the timing of Bobby’s death coincides

roughly with 9/11 is interesting, but the events are not easily paired. That the time frame

of the story roughly parallels the Great Recession, bookended as it is between Miles

trashing-out abandoned houses in Florida and the final scenes of the book, appears to be

intentional. One might even go so far as to suggest that, allegorically, Miles represents,

with Bobby’s death, the national trauma that was 9/11 (did our actions trigger the attack

somehow?); our collective ignorance of whatever deeper meaning is rooted there; the

wildly irresponsible, go-out-and-shop, orgy of house-flipping that overtook the country;

the subprime crash resulting in ‘trashing-out’ the homes of millions of Americans; and,

just when recovery seemed possible and things looked like they are getting back to

normal, another crash. Yes, that double-dip hasn’t happened yet, but many people think

that the political drift of the country all but ensures more trouble ahead. While that

certainly describes the arch of Miles’s experience, I am far from certain this is what

Auster intended. Another possibility just occurred to me. Miles, young and feeling

guilty and confused, is living the only life he could during these seven years. He’s caught

in a vortex of events he doesn’t understand, including his confusion about his culpability

for a death. He naively works to rekindles optimism about his future, finds love,

reestablishes normalcy, then rudely, crushingly, realize that he has miscalculated once

2 I’m not familiar with the play but suspect there’s a thematic connection here.


again. What could be a better description of the confused lives Americans have lived

these last ten years? What could be a better prognosis of the hardships to come?

‘Sunset Park’ is the most topical and contemporary of Auster’s works in that it reflects

and relies on recent and current events more than any other. For instance, one of his

characters, Alice Bergstrom, is working for an organization called ‘PEN Freedom to

Write Program3’ and Auster devotes several pages to PEN’s mission. He mentions

Salman Rushdie, the death of a Norwegian publisher, Article 301 of the Turkish penal

code, Burmese writers, the Patriot Act, the Campaign of Core Freedoms, Cuban writers,

and, of course, Chinese writers such as Lui Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese democracy

advocate and cowriter of something called Charter 08, and PEN’s cause celeb. While I

wholeheartedly support PEN’s mission, I’m not sure it serves his narrative well. But,

maybe that’s the price he was willing to pay in support of this worthy and, as Auster

points out, grossly underfunded organization.

Then there’s the frequent references to baseball, a passion that historically ties Miles to

his father and grandfather, a passionate interest in players who’s lives have taken

unexpected, often tragic, turns. Names like Boots Poffenburger, Herbert Jude Score and

Lucky Lohrke. If I followed the game more closely, this might have drawn me in more

than it did, but I was struck with this sentence: “…baseball is a universe as large as life

itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall

within its domain.” I might add that man’s longing for certainty, for universes that can be

comprehended and shared, is itself a universal longing. Baseball is just one example.

There’s also the obvious references to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the effects it has

had on not only on the poor but the nation’s psyche; to the shabby treatment of adjunct

professors; and to the state of publishing today, and publishers’ struggle to stay alive. It

occurred to me that Heller Publishing might be a surrogate for Auster’s long-time

publisher, which is probably struggling. Maybe Auster, trading on his reputation and the

all but certain sales his books generate, wrote this book to help his publisher get through

3 See their homepage at http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/172


http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/172

the recession. As a reader who only frequents my local ‘independent’ bookstore, I for

one am more than willing to oblige.

I’ll close with this quote from one of Auster’s characters, Renzo, a writer and lifelong

friend of Mile’s father: “The interview is a debased literary form that serves no purpose

except to simplify that which should never be simplified…” I guess he might say the

same about a book review.


‘Three Stations’ by Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith’s latest book does not measure up to his first big success, ‘Gorky

Park’. He tries to squeeze just one more story out of Arkady Renko, and it probably

won’t be his last. In this instance, Renko is a Moscow

police detective on the verge of losing his job; in fact, the

order is out to can him, so he is avoiding contact with his

corrupt boss. Renko pursues a murder case of a woman

presumed to be a prostitute who was found in a seedy

trailer at the point where three railroad stations culminate

in Moscow. But the evidence doesn’t add up and Renko’s

pursuit leads him through a maze of corruption, but not

very convincingly, including attempts on his life. While

there are lots of street level Moscow atmospherics, there

are also abrupt cutaways and plot shifts that are less than

satisfactory, as if someone else edited this novel for length

and left a few too many clues on the cutting room floor.

Sometimes you get the feeling that a writer and his publisher just need to boost their

revenues by riding on their reputation of earlier successes. The both knew Smith didn’t

have to try too hard to make some serious dough. I know, this sounds terribly cynical,

but, hey! On that score, ‘Three Stations’ succeeds beautifully.


sunset park' by paul auster, plus one

Documents