''Sunset Park'' is a novel by

Paul Auster Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. His notable works include '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), '' The Book of Illusions'' (2002), ''The ...

published in November 2010.

Plot summary

Set during the American financial recession in 2008, the college dropout Miles Heller, who has been running from his past for seven years, is forced to leave his new girlfriend in

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

and return home to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. There he unites with his old friend Bing who lives with two women in an abandoned home in the Sunset Park neighborhood in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

. Through several situations of coincidence and self-discovery, it is a story about how to reconnect with a world once left behind, and how to rejoin the human race after self-inflicted exile.

Reception

The novel was well-regarded upon publication. In

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

, novelist

Malena Watrous Malena Watrous (born in San Francisco) is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer, educator, and author of numerous magazine articles. She is a contributor to ''The San Francisco Chronicle'', ''The New York Times'', ''Real Simple'', ' ...

wrote, " uster isright that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster’s renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In 'Sunset Park,' he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie '

The Best Years of Our Lives ''The Best Years of Our Lives'' (also known as ''Glory for Me'' and ''Home Again'') is a 1946 American epic drama film directed by William Wyler, and starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Harold Rus ...

.' Yet if Auster can’t escape his own fixations — if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away — maybe that’s because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark."Malena Watrous, "Learned Lolita," ''The New York Times Book Review'', December 12, 2010.

References

External links

''New York Times Book Review'' on ''Sunset Park''''The Guardian'' on ''Sunset Park''
{{Paul Auster navbox 2010 American novels Fiction set in 2008 Novels set in Brooklyn Henry Holt and Company books Novels by Paul Auster