Venero Armanno writing in The Australian November 20, 2010 By Paul Auster
Faber & Faber, 309pp, A$32.99
IT'S difficult to think of more than a handful of writers who are as critically well-received as Paul Auster while remaining quite so prolific.
His fellow Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates come to mind, but from there the list thins.
Sunset Park is the seventh novel Auster has published in the past 10 years. The high points of this busy decade are The Book of Illusions (2002), Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and last year's Invisible, arguably his best work since his 1982 debut nonfiction, The Invention of Solitude, and the three linked novellas collected in 1987 as The New York Trilogy.
Auster also has written and directed a feature film and published a collection of poetry. So, this new novel arrives with the artist on a creative high. Beautifully crafted and containing some of his most appealing characters, Sunset Park does suffer from a weak narrative drive, however. Three-quarters of the way through I found myself wondering what the plot of really was.
The story centres on a large group of life-wounded individuals who meet up and live in a derelict squat at Brooklyn's Sunset Park, and each in their own way tries to make sense of the "miraculous strangeness of being alive". It's a wonderful set-up. It might also be proof that an Auster novel -- books traditionally centred on the almost supernatural weirdness of the human soul's wanderings -- doesn't need to be predicated on much more.
We open with 28-year-old Miles Heller, who has escaped his native New York and ended up living in Florida. There he works "thrashing out", which means he cleans out homes that have been deserted for any number of reasons, including the modern blight of mortgage defaults. There he is sort of in thrall to the startling array of things people leave behind when they decide to desert their homes.
Miles takes photographs of these abandoned things, from pianos to oil paintings, but, unlike his co-workers, doesn't help himself to them.
We soon discover Miles has a greater passion and her name is Pilar Sanchez, underage by a one year but many years ahead of her contemporaries in terms of wisdom and depth of emotion.
Miles adores everything about Pilar, even if she is a legal risk; Pilar's eldest sister, Angela, who shares none of her sibling's fine sensibilities, decides to play that risk against Miles. She tells him that unless he furnishes her with the best of the loot taken from the deserted homes, she will inform the authorities of his sexual dalliances with a minor. For six months Miles buys Pillar from her family and the two live together in a sort of daily ecstasy, but Miles can't bring himself to continue giving Angela what she wants.
Escaping Florida for New York, Miles teams up with an old friend named Bing Nathan, who operates the Hospital for Broken Things, which is more of a concept than a business. Bing has recently moved into a shabby squat with several acquaintances, among them Ellen, a sad and erotically charged artist, and Alice, a student writing a thesis on pop culture. As Miles joins this group of squatters and brings the teenage Pilar over from Florida, things become complicated.
The network of interlinked characters doesn't stop there, and some of the book's best passages concern the fractious relationship between Miles and his estranged parents.
Morris Heller is a highbrow publisher with a troubled personal life who fears he will end his career writing a memoir called something such as Forty Years in the Desert: Publishing Literature in a Country Where People Hate Books. Miles's mother, Mary-Lee, is many years divorced from Morris and is a famous actress. Unfortunately, neither of these attributes make her a great mother.
Each section of Sunset Park is told from the point of view of a different character and the novel unfolds as a mosaic rather than in a straight line. Though the storytelling seems patchy, this approach does give Auster the chance to play with a certain amount of metafiction and intertextuality (the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives is dissected in passionate detail; baseball trivia gets more than a brief look-in), but his focus on life and living, and dreams and longing, remains clear and deep.
This is not Auster's best novel but it is memorable and moving nonetheless.
(Novelist Venero Armanno teaches creative writing at University of Queensland).
Review at The Independent.
Review at The Guardian
Review at The Telegraph.
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