Sunset Park; Paul Auster

Title: Sunset Park
Author: Paul Auster
Publication Year: 2010
Publisher: Macmillian Audio
Edition: Audio Book 
Reader: (Author)
Source: Amazon Vine
Date Completed: 1/23/2011
Setting:  Florida and New York
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Recommend: Yes

Sunset Park is a different type of story, and in some ways it felt more like an intense character study. Its central character is Miles Heller, age 28, an intelligent, but directionless, Brown University dropout, who has been estranged from his family for a number of years. Miles has been harboring guilt over his part in an accident which took the life of his step-brother, Bobby, and which has torn his family apart. Miles father owns a struggling  book publishing company in New York, his step-mother is an English professor, and his mother, an actress in the city. In Florida, Miles has been getting by odd jobs in Florida cleaning up foreclosed homes during the housing crisis, while trying to keep his relationship with Pilar, an under-aged teenager quiet.

Soon after tempers flare with the family of his girlfriend,  Miles hears from his old friend, Bing Nathan in New York. Miles boards a bus and heads back to Brooklyn.  Bing is a man who detests technology and runs a shop called "The Hospital of Broken Things", where forgotten things of the past, like broken manual typewriters, old radios etc. get repaired. When Bing invites Miles to become a squatter in an empty apartment in the Sunset park section of Brooklyn, he joins him along with two women: Alice Bergstrom, who works part-time while working on her dissertation, and Ellen Brice, a unsuccessful real-estate agent, obsessed with the human body, who wants to be an artist.

Like, "The Hospital for Broken Things", the characters in Sunset Part are a collection of "broken souls" struggling to find a place in this world, haunted in some way by their damaged past. At times the story seemed conveniently, contrived, and the narrative without direction, yet the characters  and their issues seemed very genuine. I thought the contemporary post-recession time frame was perfect as well. In the end, some things were left unresolved, leaving me with unanswered questions, and curious as to whether this was unintentional or whether Auster has a sequel in the works. The audio book was read by the author. It wasn't the best reading by far, but it did not turn me off to the book either. Not perfect, but still one you might wish to consider if you have enjoyed this author in the past.