Sunset Park (2010) by Paul Auster

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sunset Park (2010)

by Paul Auster

Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 3/28

New York: 68/105

  I don't like Paul Auster, something I was reminded of while reading his obituary the other day.  I'm sure it has something to do with his status as an apostle of Brooklyn hipster culture, which I don't love.  To me, he just feels so middlebrow, like the literary fiction equivalent of a beach read novel by Elin Hilderbrand.  I don't hate the author or his books, I just don't find much to like.  In any of them. Ever. It's like his fans are people who read American literary fiction in English but have never read a book translated from French or German that was written in the past fifty years.  Because if they had they would know there are writers- like Patrick Modriano- who basically do the same thing and have won the Nobel Prize and shit. Nobody read Patrick Modriano in English. 

  Sunset Park has no whimsical details or existentialist detectives.  Rather it is an ensemble piece about four proto-hipsters who inhabit a squat in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn.   The main dude is Miles Teller, son of a wealthy Publisher who abandons college after overhearing his Dad and Step Mom say something mean about him (not kidding).  When the book picks up he's working a wagie job in Florida when he meets his 17 year old girlfriend, a Cuban-American who is the underage manic pixie girl of Miles' dreams.  Auster is light on the sex stuff, that is, after he establishes that Pilar, his nymphet, will only let him fuck her in the ass to avoid pregnancy.  Thanks, Paul Auster, for that detail.

   Amazingly he's not the only character with underage sex issues- another of his housemates, a girl, is still recovering from the time she fucked a 15 year old who she was supposed to be Nannying- of course she got pregnant, had an abortion and thinks about it all the time.  It's a Paul Auster novel!  I listened to the Audiobook, read by the author, and at the end I was like, "That's the last Paul Auster novel for me ever!"