Sunset Park
by Paul Auster
(Faber and Faber, R184.95)
Paul Auster’s fascination with coincidence and the ways in which it can shape your experience of the world has been apparent in many of his novels.
The Music of Chance and The Invention of Solitude both centre on this theme, and speaking about the latter, Auster has said he believes the world to be filled by strange events, with reality being “a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for”.
In Sunset Park, coincidence is again at work, this time in the shadow of the 2008 recession.
As a teenager, Miles Heller had seen his life wrenched into an unrecognisable shape thanks to one terrible coincidence. Now, only a little older, he has cut almost all ties with his family and his past.
His days are spent as a trash-out worker in southern Florida, photographing the objects left behind by families forced to abandon their homes.
In New York his father, an independent publisher struggling to weather the economic downturn and save his marriage, is desperate for news of his son, who vanished seven years ago.
His only link to the boy is Bing, Miles’s friend, who now runs The Hospital for Broken Things. Bing’s shop specialises in repairing the artefacts of a vanished era – type-writers, fountain pens, gumball machines, rotary telephones.
Bing and two young women are squatting in a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and when Miles is forced to return to New York, this is where he ends up, in a move that will leave his life changed in too many unforeseen ways.
Auster weaves the many strands of his story into a fascinating novel about the latter-day US and its forgotten ghosts. In following Miles and the characters he brings together – by chance, not design – the reader is drawn into their world, with their hopes and fears becoming too real for comfort. But then Auster’s never been a writer to offer comfort to his readers. – Iolandi Pool