Sunset Park: A Novel
In approaching a work of literature in a world ever more dominated by lovestruck vampires, teenage werewolves, young New York nannies/interns/journalists, and other tales of passion, fashion, and romantic intrigue that have become more and more what we think of first when we say the word “fiction,” the reader begins to wonder what will be the fate of the literary lions in this Brave New World of pop-up books for adults?
The reader wonders, on his off days, which among them—much like which of our banks—will fail? There is Stephen King, of course, who must be included among the literate, if not among those who produce literature. Surely, he is Bank of America. He is too big to fail. But what of those whose work, however brilliant, could not support a Saudi prince with their sales? For them we must worry.
And worry we must about Paul Auster, because he is that rarest thing: the true writer, the artist who works with words as if they were colors that came from tubes, were mixed on his pallet, and then applied skillfully, oh, so skillfully to the blank canvas, yielding a work at once beautiful and truthful and, most important, insightful.
He is a writer who takes his inspiration from New York City, which places him in a lineage that includes poets Hart Crane and Walt Whitman—even W. H. Auden—and street poet Damon Runyan, to say nothing of as diverse a group of fellow authors as Dorothy Parker, Grace Paley, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and William Styron. Auster has, in past novels, created for his joyful readers a New York City so real that you can almost feel the bedbugs.
But in his new work, Sunset Park, he scares the hell of his reader. Why? Because the narrative opens in the year 2008 in the state of Florida, wherein our protagonist has chosen to embrace his cultural zeitgeist by becoming a “trashing out” specialist—a glorified garbageman who enters foreclosed properties to clear them out for the banks that own them. Because Miles Heller, the protagonist, buys a digital camera so that he can take pictures of all the items he finds before he discards them. And because the literary device of photographing things, while not original to Auster—it was, of course, Christopher Isherwood who identified himself as actually being a camera—most certainly is something that the author has used before and to better and more original result.
Just as the reader reaches the point of dark, sticky moodiness, the narrative flashes back quite suddenly to the Berkshires and to a plot point which, like the geography, could best be described as recycled John Irving. At this point, the reader wonders what next: Will poor Miles get it into his head to swim through all the swimming pools of Westchester? But then the miracle happens and Miles gets on the damned bus to NYC, and we finally get our bedbugs.
Once we get to New York City we encounter Sunset Park. It is a woebegone section of Brooklyn whose chief feature is the Green Wood Cemetery, more than half the size of Central Park. It is also a necropolis within the metropolis that houses, Auster tells us, such past luminaries as Elias Howe, in inventor of the sewing machine, as well as John Underwood of typewriter fame and Henry Steinway, who made a damned good piano, plus Frank Morgan, who portrayed the Wizard of Oz. We also find that, like us, Auster is worried about the same things that the reader had projected upon him: about loss of house and home, about the fate of the arts in a world of rubble and, specifically, about the fate of that little world in which he himself is an acknowledged luminary—the world of publishing.
Sunset Park is populated by a little group of squatters who have helped themselves to a hovel that has been seized for back taxes and left by the city to sit vacant. Filling its empty rooms is a rotating roster of fledgling artists, graduate students only a dissertation away from graduation, and lost souls.
Chief among these is Bing Nathan, perhaps the burliest of lost souls, but a lost soul nonetheless. In Bing we get a mystery. A childhood friend of Miles’, he is at once the heart of the novel, certainly its most interesting character, and its chief instigator in that he brings the crowd together and sets wheels in motion, both inside the walls of the Sunset Park squat and within the boundaries of the plot itself. And yet Bing is left relatively unexplored and underdeveloped—indeed, finally abandoned by his author—that he seems just a bit more of the general flotsam and jetsam. The rubble. Something that Miles might do well to hurry and photograph.
Like those who live day by day in Sunset Park, squatting and knowing the risk that any day may come the knock on the door, that while many bad things have happened, the worst thing is yet to come, the reader, turning page after page, experiences nothing so much as a growing sense of dread. Learns no lesson greater than that is might well be wiser all the way around to not hope for better things, not to try tempting fate, but to, as Auster tells us Miles has done, learn “to have no plans, which is to say, to have no longings or hopes, to be satisfied with your lot, to accept what the world doles out to you from one sunrise to the next.”
Sunset Park is a story about running your hands through the piles of detritus that are left by others when they move on. It takes place both emotionally and spiritually in the days after Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is set. The orchard lost, and the family moves on, leaving behind tables, tears, rotten apples, and torn lace (among other things). Like The Cherry Orchard, this story is about abrupt cultural transitions. But Sunset Park is a book that both concerns itself with and is comprised of those bits of flotsam and jetsam, some Auster’s, others not. That bit of Irving in the plot, that moment of Cheever in the viewpoint, the name of Bing’s little store that seems straight out of Anne Tyler’s Baltimore (although she would have wisely used it as her title as well): A Hospital for Broken Things.
Sunset Park gives us many broken things, fragments of plot, moments of insight, nuance of character and, of course, Auster’s perfect turn of phrase (“and then, in the darkness behind his lids, he sees himself as a black speck in a world made of snow”), but it sadly gives us no hospital in which these things can heal and become whole.
As such, Sunset Park might be considered a structural misfire. But, oh, consider the bits and pieces themselves. Think of the thing as an accumulation of Miles’ photos. Look within the rubble at the nature of the things we’ve lost and consider their overwhelming value.
Take a moment and consider what links Brooklyn and Manhattan and Florida and the Berkshires. What links Chekhov and Cheever and Irving and Tyler in their shrinking world of publishing. What links the millions who have lost their homes until that word, home, takes on the significance of a quest. Take a moment and read the words that have emanated from Auster and see if you are not, like him and his reader, like those who are losing their cherry orchards, left heartbroken as a result.