George Saunders wrote, in his preface to the short story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: “…a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as [the author] could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.”
I guess in that regard, you can look at any book and say “well done, you did it, put words on page.” Thus, find my writing!
Who knows if I’m a fair judge (but I’m putting myself in the position of judge, dag-nabit), but Paul Auster’s Sunset Park didn’t hit me with the punch of great fiction. There were moments, yes, when I felt like he was writing thoughts right out of my head. When his descriptions of characters’ motives or their impulses vs. actions vs. consequences felt very close to my own experiences, but I didn’t feel the creepy-satisfaction that comes from reading great, insightful fiction. The feeling that the author somehow has some deep, terrific connection (maybe forged through some dark deal with a devil) to the stuff that makes simple living much, much more complicated, and has the ability to warn us, to guide us, to favor us during our passage through life.
Sunset Park was beautiful, but it felt most alive when it was bizarre and surprisingly grotesque; the boundary pushing moments when characters confronted new sexual desires, discoveries and frustrations felt the most vivid and direct, and shook me out of the comfort that the rest of the quietly crafted story had lulled me into. In an interview with Leonard Pierce of A.V. Club, Paul Auster said that the image/idea that was kicking around his brain before the novel began to take shape was “dispossessed.”
The plot-points of the book center on Miles Heller’s dispossession in regards to geography: he flees New York for Florida in order to escape the familial fallout from the death (incidentally caused by Miles) of his brother, and eventually returns to New York only to be kicked back on his ass (literally, and well… you get it). Miles works in Florida as a photographer for a company which organizes the crap left behind when families are forcibly removed from their property. And finally, each character—whose stories Auster weaves into the novel via their relationship with Miles—is undergoing identity upheaval: socially, romantically, sexually, professionally, you name it.
As these different story lines cross and glide past each other, you sense gradual panic in Auster’s story: once Miles reunites with his abandoned New York and confronts his dark past… what will happen? Here’s where the book fell apart for me. In Auster’s final scene, a devastating final dispossession occurs, which ruptures all the positive, relationship-y stuff that Miles had worked to form with his family and friends and his new life in New York. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s a sudden, 180-degree turn from the moderate but well-earned success that Miles and his cohorts achieved at this point in the story, and—in my humble eyes—only serves to teach us that our good works are inevitably destroyed by, I don’t know… bad habits?
My take away from Sunset Park will be the quieter moments, less concerned with Miles rise and fall, when the camera focused delicately on a characters eyes or hands, moving impulsively toward what they truly desired. Those hidden moments, briefly brought to light, made the story feel—for a moment—closer to home.
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