"Sunset Park" by Paul Auster

Four damaged people squat in a derelict house in Sunset Park, New York. Good looking Miles, whom everyone fancies, is waiting for his girlfriend to become old enough to be legal. Haunted by the death of his step brother, he is hiding from his publisher father and his actress mother. So he's ordinary then. Ellen, reeling from an abortion, wants to be an artist and spends her time drawing erotic sketches copied from porn magazines. Big bear-like Bing, who frames prints and mends old fashioned stuff in his shop, the Hospital for Broken Things, poses in the nude for Ellen, masturbating for her before finishing himself off in her mouth. Alice is in the last stages of writing her dissertation about a post-WWII Hollywood film and breaking up with her boyfriend.

Four damaged characters undergoing the process of healing, just as the Hospital mends Broken Things.

A quirky novel which explores the way we humans, with our dreams and our sorrows, struggle against outrageous fortune, always losing as we age.

Feb 2011; 308 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God