Book Cheer: Paul Auster's Sunset Park
By Jason Bennett Aug 4, 2010Paul Auster has been a favorite of many an LJ Book Review editor; Hachette Assistant Library Marketing Manager Jason Bennett assures us he's scored again with Sunset Park. The first ten librarians to email library@macmillanusa.com get a free galley of the Brooklyn resident's latest.--Heather McCormack
Name: Jason Bennett
Title: Assistant Library Marketing Manager, Hachette Book Group
Favorite Genres: Literary fiction, food, gardening books, urban pastoral, politics
Lifelong Favorites: (in no particular order) George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, and David Foster Wallace's Everything and More.
The Winner: Here's a confession: I had never read Paul Auster before I received the galley for Sunset Park (November, Henry Holt) in the mail a few weeks ago. He's always been one of those writers whose oeuvre was "on my list," but for some reason or another he never made it to the top. After reading it, I'm sure I've found an excellent place to start.
The novel begins with Miles Heller, our protagonist, taking pictures of debris and clearing it from foreclosed houses in Florida. This backdrop of a sea of empty, trashed houses-new homes where hopes and dreams of families had barely taken root-resonates throughout the book and is a perfect metaphor for the state that Miles has both found himself in and created. We soon come to learn that Miles is not a native Floridian but a New Yorker in self-imposed exile from his family because of a sense of guilt he feels for an accident that happened as a teenager.
I won't offer any spoilers by telling you exactly what the accident is (Auster gives you the answer within the first 40 pages anyway); suffice it to say it perfectly illustrates one of the big paradoxes we face as a society, from the subprime crisis and Great Recession to the Deep Water Horizon explosion and massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: How much power do we have to create our circumstances? How much do they create us? Where and when does our responsibility begin? Where and when can we truly say something is out of our hands? And how much do we have sheer luck-good or bad-to thank?
Sunset Park is sprawling but taut, toweringly ambitious in scope yet wholly intimate in the sphere of its characters' lives. While we still teeter on the brink of recession in an uncertain economic recovery-with millions still out of work and losing their homes-this novel is probably one of the most important literary touchstones of our era. And it's a true pleasure to read.
