Sunset Park - Book Review

Sunset Park, a Novel by Paul Auster

Reviewed by Martin Maden

I live in Germany so I do not come across many novels in their original English print. Usually, I buy my novels at train stations although when I was living in Heidelberg there was a great book shop off the Hauptstrasse where you could buy and also order English books.

I came across "Sunset Park" at the train station here in Bielefeld where I live and as the blurb on the back cover referred to the real estate debt and foreclosures in New York during the ongoing banking crisis, I wanted to see how the novelist would treat the situation in a fictional setting.

"Intense and engrossing." - cried the Times Literary Supplement

"A wonderfully unpredictable story of fatal manipulations...fascinatingly enjoyable." - Literary Review

"This is Auster, so nothing turns out as you expect...Compelling." - Sunday Telegraph

Okay, I thought, as I walked out with this book from "The International Best Selling Author of 'Invisible'.."

So I got on the train and fell asleep many times during the connections to the Netherlands. Not because of the book, in fact I hadn't even opened it, but I had been working late on a film the night before so I woke up only when I had to change trains, three times, before reaching Delft.

On the way back I decided to read the novel which started out very well but you could tell earlier on that this novelist was a craftsman and was soon beginning to show off his writing skills. So I thought, okay, let him ply his craft.

The first chapter is normal. It prepares you for some almost "post apocalyptic" kind of showdown maybe... In that chapter, through the work and photographic hobby of the main character, you get a description, using the photographed images, of a deteriorating economy, manifested through the decay and the rotting of abandoned homes where people once lived before the crash. 

We meet people, three colleagues, in what appears to be the new life of our main character by their names, habits and even by their nicknames. But such is the assumed skill of the author that he does not feel any need to mention our hero of the story by name in the actual text of the whole of the first chapter.

'Miles Heller' is mentioned as a stand alone title, but as you read the first chapter, you forget that. There is very little else to endear this name to you in that first part of the novel. The author delves into other characters and starts to set the stage to build his plot but he forgets a very basic principle, he forgets that the reader first needs to really get to know Miles, the hero of the story.

This early, in the book you already feel the author sniping at his own novel to assert his own observations and sense of prose. It is almost as though, the author is already clashing with his own creation for the forum space.

This seems to be a style consideration, but it is these kinds of choices throughout, that eventually become detrimental to the overall structure and integrity of the novel.

It is not until the end of the second chapter that we meet Miles by name and you have to be very careful there because you could just have missed the moment when his name is finally mentioned. You are used to knowing him as he, that Miles, his actual name, finds it difficult to enter your reading consciousness.

This is after you've met his father by name, his stepmother and stepbrother, after you've met his underaged lover Pilar, a 17 year old Puerto Rican girl, after they have made love many times, after you have met her entire family of sisters and their children, you finally get to meet Miles, the main character, by name. 

You actually feel the initial reaction to the name. It's as if the reader has already adopted a character and in lieu of a name provided by the novelist, has given him another name by then and so when the author comes back to reclaim the right to name the character, there is a slight loss of the reader's adoption of the character. Never a good thing.

Okay you let it go because the storytelling is still good at that point. And don't get me wrong the storytelling is good all the way, in fact it is so good that the author, so trusting in his own craft, believes he can put anything on paper and just by the use of his massive array of literary devices, that he can please any reader.

We now know Miles by his actual name, and we get to know that he was in a fight with his stepbrother Bobby, which led to a tragic accident, where Bobby got run over by a car and killed. So Miles is on the run from his own past and you start to follow the story trying to understand the degree of his innocence and anticipating a confrontation with a guilty conscience. You're are with Miles, trying to understand how he is dealing with that past, but all you are getting from the author is  a litany of the boy's virtues. It's like the author knows that the boy is innocent so he does not bother to describe Miles' pain in a way that the audience could feel it and share that understanding. Okay that's the author's right to keep a reader outside the loop maybe for dramatic purpose.

But as you go on reading, you are suddenly made to think, hang on, this is going on for a while now. This is the story of a 28 year old boy and it is starting to feel that it is being told from the pen of a 60 years old writer. Somewhere this soon becomes apparent as it dawns on the reader that you are not going to get a gut felt description of the main character.

Throughout the novel, one keeps expecting Paul Auster to eventually get down to really describing Miles, not only with a character profile but as a person of that age, gifted not only with challenges and pain, but with the actual drive and vision of a person trying to deal with and to reconcile with a brother's death. 

Unbelievably, and getting ahead of myself, the reader will not get that at all. It does not happen. Paul Auster never gets to the crux of that matter.

The author throws everything including the kitchen sink at the story until at the end we are totally assured that Paul Auster is a very intelligent man. And that he would be even more intelligent if only he could actually tell us a good story.

Instead, Miles gets into various troubles, over his relationship with Pilar and has to leave Florida in a hurry in order to escape to "Sunset Park" which is a communal flat in New York, where he arrives, heralded like a Messiah, preceded by stories of people who admire and adore him. In fact Miles is so fabulous that one of the girls of the communal flat even masturbates in anticipation of his arrival. Imagine that..!

Waiting for Miles in New York is a host of new characters and Paul Auster proceeds to introduce them to us, without any fear of losing the plot. Well we are in the hands of Paul Auster. We can't get lost. Right?

Anyway, we are in a banking crash in New York but the book's characters are trying to save Liu Xiaobo the Nobel peace prize winner from imprisonment in China. This Liu Xiaobo is being used as a connecting device for five of the characters whose lives threaten to come together, but at the end doesn't quite happen.

In spite of that distraction, in fact we don't lose the plot. But we end up losing Miles for a considerable amount of the novel. We lose Miles because the author has decided to build part of the boy's character profile through the eyes, questions and expectations of other people. People who are saving businesses, struggling to pay the rent, dealing with their own sexuality, saving a human rights activist...

That is all very well, but a novelist must never forget the personal character that belongs only to the reader and not to the other characters in the book.

In that maze of character descriptions the author then leads us through parts of New York, where we finally get to meet Miles' biological mother, and to be led through the artistic world of the New York theatrical scene, by the woman who deserted Miles when he was still a baby, to reunite the boy with his mother, and eventually we end up with a new character, Mile's father Morris, who runs a small book publishing agency. 

Morris is such the epitome of the all around principled American entrepreneur for the author, that he makes the reader stay with him for a long time. The description of Morris is quite elaborate so that you start to feel: "Okay Paul Auster, you should have made this man your principle character, since you understand him better than you understand Miles, and since you choose to explain the deterioration of the economy from his perspective, from the plans he had for a possible future for his son...

As soon as we get to New York, the novel begins to fill up with these memories of America from the 1940s to the present. 

Miles is 28 years old. 28 years ago was 1983. Why is Miles thinking from under the hat of a post World War II American man? That is history. But how is that history manifested in the life and heritage of our main character? Through baseball and collections of baseball memorabilia...

Why is he facing his difficulties which coincide with the financial melt down through the memories of his father and grandfather? Good question.

Last chance for you Mr. Paul Auster. There is one way you can still save this novel. Give us a victory at Sunset Park, or at least a way for the audience to proceed beyond Sunset Park and to make some sense of the financial meltdown. Give your audience a victory or a defined closure. 

To be fair, I will not give you the ending of the story. But as Miles steadies himself to face the consequences of clashing with the law, his family is at his side once more as he rides the final paragraphs of Sunset Park looking for the final full stop. There is none.

This novel cost me €8.95. To me the whole work felt like a first draft. If could be made into a film but it needs a lot, a lot of work, to focus the characters and get the core issues that challenge the main characters defined.

This novel has no narrative purpose except to reminisce romantically about a lost economical era. The writer does not prove that he is well versed with the old economical era to be able to compare it with the one that is crashing. Maybe he does understand his subject, but he has spent valuable space playing around with his writing tools and skills. Too much showing off of a writers virtuosity to be able to concentrate on simple story telling. If he wanted to use the banking crisis as a backdrop of his story, at the end he did not manage to tell a story. Stringing together a bunch of characters whose lives embody the nature of the hopelessness does not warrant the declared promise of a novel.

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Novel published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

ISBN 978-0-571-25881-9