Add Paul Auster's Sunset Park to the list of recent novels that tell their stories against a contemporary backdrop of economic struggles. Auster’s novel frames classic themes — brother-against-brother, father-and-son alienation, Lolita-like attraction, fading beauty and failing endeavor — inside the foreclosure crisis, using it both as setting and symbol.
Auster, a genre to himself, captured minds in 1985 with City of Glass (part of a trilogy) a sort of existential, smart-noir detective novel that cast more shadow than light. Sunset Park uses the foreclosure crisis to symbolize uncertainty.
Miles Heller works in “home preservation.” He is part of a crew that goes into abandoned South Florida real estate and cleans it up for quick resale. Miles brings his camera and documents the wreckage left behind by the displaced families. The images he takes read like a litany:
“…sofas, silk lingerie, caulking guns, thumbtacks, plastic action figures, tubes of lipstick, rifles, discolored mattresses , knives and forks, poker chips, a stamp collection, and a dead canary lying at the bottom of its cage.”
After Miles leaves Florida, he moves into an abandoned, foreclosed property with an old friend and other squatters. They try to establish their lives while waiting for the inevitable pounding on the door.
It's not enough for Auster to frame larger subjects in contemporary settings. It figures in his characters' motivation. And there are other in-the-news touches. Miles father is a publisher watching his business and his marriage evaporate. A young man resists progress and embraces the technology of his childhood and before. And there's generational comparisons. One of the squatters is writing a thesis on the relationship between American women and men, circa 1946.When she discusses the men in William Wyler's film The Best Years Of Our Lives coming home from the war to reestablish relationships, one can't help but think of our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
In the end, Sunset Park is about wounds and healing, about reuniting and overcoming. Auster has mastered reality, as well as the surrealism that goes with it.
The Cabbage Rabbit Review of Books and Music