Devotees (!?) of this blog will know that Paul Auster novels are automatic queue-jumpers in my waiting list of books-to-read,and may have been a little surprised that Sunset Park did not appear earlier. The truth is, unaccountably, that I managed to miss the appearance of this one, to the extent it was out in paperback before I cottoned on. (Just as well, because the beach/pool reading venue left this little book rather crinkled with damp and crunchy with grains of black Strombolian sand.)
Sunset Park is recent-Auster-on-form. After his flirtations with metaphysical allegory, he has got back to telling stories in his last two or three books, albeit stories occupying typically Austerian territory. Here we have a familiar set of components: a life marked by a defining tragedy; the quirky hand of chance and coincidence ever present; the mixed cast of characters, different yet with common humanity, isolated yet connected and connectable in the right circumstances; the unusual living arrangements; the homecoming to Brooklyn; a penchant for baseball, old Hollywood movies and European literature...
Sunset Park is about a gifted young man, of complex but loving family, who is induced to exile himself from his successful life because of the remorse he feels over the role he played in causing the accidental death of his stepbrother. Like many Auster heroes before him, he finds himself drifting through a series of deliberately menial jobs, cut off at the same time from the world in which he really belongs and from the one he inhabits. In the mode of more recent Auster, it is love -albeit love of a problematic, even reprehensible, kind - which brings his isolation to an end and induces him to turn back to his past and face up to it. However, this wouldn't be Auster if it were as straightforward as that, and much of the richness and value of this book lies not in the linear narrative of Miles Heller's literal and metaphorical homecoming, but from the intersection of the events and characters which surround him. The people around Miles, his lover, his friends, his two families and their friends, matter not only to his story, but have their own stories, which, like everything else, are interconnected but also independent. There are no clear good and bad guys here, no definitive outcomes, just goodwill and badwill and events defined in part by how people behave but perhaps in greater part just by how things work out.
This theme - the "music of chance" - is of course the Auster theme par excellence. It is illustrated throughout this novel by anecdotes, stories swapped by fathers and sons, sometimes about tragedy-afflicted baseball players, promising careers cut short by freakish accidents; sometimes about unbelievably lucky players, whose fortuitous near-misses with death and disaster are the stuff of legend. These stories are a leitmotiv, serving not only as illustrations of the fickleness of fate (indeed, the lucky often turn out unlucky and vice versa), but as a great bonding and healing mechanism between men (this is a male preserve) who need a way to talk to each other.
"Men who don't talk" are in fact an explicit sub-theme of the novel as well as an implicit theme. Alice, a big-hearted, studious mid-Western girl who shares the squat in Brooklyn where Miles comes to live (squatting being an emblematically precarious, provisional, borderline way of living) is studying the changes in relations between the sexes in 1945-7 as reflected in films of the period. In fact, her study becomes a sympathetic fascination for "men who don't talk", wartime returnees, damaged for ever by their experiences of war and unable genuinely to reconnect with peacetime lives, partners and families. Paradoxically, Alice finds herself admiring these men as a category, seeing them as more real men than the voluble young guys around her in modern New York. Whence a whole other theme in the book, the notion that wounds, damage both physical and emotional, are part and parcel of growing up and achieving maturity. There is nothing desirable, still less noble, in this - indeed, the extremely variable capacity people have for absorbing tragedy is seen as allowing them to accumulate ultimately more than they can bear. One of the most positive characters in these pages, Miles' young Cuban-American girlfriend, Pilar, is in fact the opposite, an emblem of youth, hope, optimism and vitality. She will accumulate her own damage in time, no doubt, but Auster allows us to see her entirely positively for the time being, his explicit association of her with another life-enhancing young woman, who inexplicably commits suicide, not being ominous, as it might be in the hands of another writer, but just the usual warning that we can never really tell how anything is going to work out. Some baseball players get very lucky, others crash out through no fault of their own in their first season...
It may be true that Paul Auster keeps writing the same book. It would be fair to say he has got it down to a fine art, seemingly able to publish at regular intervals. There is more death and sex in these books than perhaps there was, focuses of an ageing writer maybe, but in essence Auster has settled to his theme. This is OK, because he has the skills of a great storyteller, his novels enjoyable at that level as well as for the underlying world view.
It may be clear by now that, for me anyway, that's just fine.
The storyteller on form: Sunset Park
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