Wednesday, November 17, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., free, 212-253-0810, 7:00
Thursday, November 18, Book Court, 163 Court St., free, 718-875-3677, 7:00
www.macmillan.com/sunsetpark
Ho hum; another year, another Paul Auster novel that deals with books, baseball, and Brooklyn. But before you dismiss the Newark-born author’s latest, SUNSET PARK (Henry Holt, November 2010, $25), you should also know that it is one of the best works of fiction of this young century. For more than twenty-five years, Auster has been one of America’s most distinguished novelists, having written such superb books as THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (1985-87), THE MUSIC OF CHANCE (1990), LEVIATHAN (1992), and THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES (2005), all of which feature unusual characters caught up in unusual situations often propelled by coincidence. But as good as Auster has been over the course of his career, he has taken a giant leap forward with SUNSET PARK, a marvelously crafted tale that is about a lot more than just books, baseball, and Brooklyn.
Miles Heller is an Ivy League dropout who is still trying to deal with the tragic death of his teenage brother and has fallen in love with a high school student, Pilar Sanchez, who is wise beyond her years but under the thumb of one of her older sisters. Heller hasn’t seen or talked to his long-divorced parents since he suddenly left Brown seven years earlier; his father, Morris, is an independent publisher of highly regarded literary fiction, while his mother, Mary-Lee Swann, is a world-famous Hollywood actress about to take on the challenging lead role in Samuel Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS on Broadway. With nowhere to turn after his personal safety is threatened by Pilar’s sister, Miles, who had been working in South Florida for a realty company, rummaging through houses for valuable items after the bank had evicted the owners, heads back to Brooklyn, where he moves into a squatter’s house across the street from Green-Wood Cemetery, joining his college friend Bing Nathan, who runs the Hospital for Broken Things; Ellen Brice, a lonely painter damaged by a complicated affair; and Alice Bergstrom, a Scandinavian woman with a brutish boyfriend and self-esteem problems who is toiling away on her dissertation, which focuses on William Wyler’s classic 1946 film, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, while also working at the PEN American Center, which is trying to gain the release of imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo (who actually was just honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in real life). Each of these characters could be the subject of their own book, as Auster fleshes them out wonderfully, getting into their psyche, not unlike how Wyler does in his award-winning movie about the effects WWII had on the American family.
Auster’s writing has always been cinematic — he has written several screenplays and directed films as well — but it’s particularly so in SUNSET PARK, as the longtime Brooklyn resident delves deep into each person’s past, bringing their fears and desires, their successes and failures, to life in long, brilliant passages that don’t want to end; the run-on sentences of the beginning soon flow into breathless narratives, one of which goes on for two and a half pages and some seven hundred words before a disappointing period finally appears. SUNSET PARK is a supremely beautiful book by one of Brooklyn’s best. Auster will be reading from and signing copies of SUNSET PARK on November 17 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and November 18 at Book Court in Park Slope.