Summary and Reviews of Sunset Park by Paul Auster

Watch the video clip below to hear Paul Auster read from Sunset Park:

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For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things. There are at least two jobs every day, sometimes as many as six or seven, and each time he and his cohorts enter another house, they are confronted by the things, the innumerable cast-off things left behind by the departed families. The absent people have all fled in haste, in shame, in confusion, and it is certain that wherever they are living now (if they have found a place to live and are not camped out in the streets) their new dwellings are smaller than the houses they have lost. Each house is a story of failure - of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure - and he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. What is the meaning of baseball to each of the three generations of Heller men, especially in terms of luck and chance?



2. Morris ponders his own father Alvin's wounded eye from a baseball, thinking that it is no different than a war wound because "part of his life had been shot down." Do you agree?



3. The 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives figures prominently in the novel. How are the horrors of World War II linked to the struggles of the characters in Sunset Park? Do they speak to a fundamental contradiction to the idea of the American dream?



4. Do you agree with Alice's idea in her thesis that after the devastating effects of war, families can never go back to the way they were?



5. Why does Alice believe that Miles is an old ...