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.
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 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 Program[3]’ 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 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 terminate 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. They 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.
[1] This is the title of an earlier book. See my earlier post of Paul Auster’s book ‘Invisible.’ 'Invisible' Review
[2] I’m not familiar with the play but suspect there’s a thematic connection here.
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