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CRITIQUE:

Narrative Exercises

Once again, in this novel, Paul Auster explores the nature of narrative, though he approaches it from the point of view of an exercise rather than an experiment.

The novel is divided more or less into two halves: in the first, Auster invents his characters, painting deft portraits of each one. In the second (called "All"), he flips the switch, turns them on, and stands by, while they interact with each other, as members of either a fractured family or a splintered peer group.

The Global Financial Crisis

The novel is set in 2008 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.

The GFC impacted greatly on people's housing arrangements.

The only people who were safe were those whose homes were unencumbered. Those with mortgages were soon unable to make their payments, and many of their homes were foreclosed, quickly creating a trail of homeless to the cities.


Foreclosure Trash-Out (or Clean-Out) Services

Squatters, the Homeless and the Homely

Seven and a half years before, the protagonist, 28 year old Miles Heller (an English major), dropped out of college at Brown after three years, left his parents' home in the West Village, and moved to South Florida, where he eventually obtained work "trashing out" foreclosed homes:

"Each house is a story of failure."

A member, like most of his New York friends, of the creative middle class, he documents on a digital camera what remains of the mortgagors' personal effects. He's a latter-day Dorothea Lange.

His father, Morris Heller, owns a successful publishing house (Heller Books), the output of which has been severely reduced by the GFC. Morris has divorced Miles' blood mother, Mary-Lee Swann, an actress ("they loved each other, but they couldn't get along"), and remarried to Willa, a Professor of English at NYU.

Miles' girlfriend, 17 year old Pilar (she's constantly referred to as underage), lives in a share house with her three sisters, following the death of both parents in a car accident. She's proposed that she move into Miles' modest apartment in a poor neighbourhood, but her oldest sister objects.

Miles and Pilar share a passion for literature. They met when both were reading "The Great Gatsby" in a public park:

"In the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of."

Dorothea Lange: "Stop Sign"

"The Best Years of Our Lives"

Just when Miles is contemplating returning to New York ("there is no question that he has had his fill of the Florida sun"), his school friend, Bing Nathan (now a contrarian, activist and jazz drummer), invites him to replace the fourth person in a household that has taken shape in an abandoned house in the eponymous neighbourhood of Brooklyn.

One of the other squatters, Alice Bergstrom, is doing a thesis about William Wyler's film, She's -

"a tall, big-boned Scandinavian girl from Wisconsin with a round face and meaty arms, a person of heft and seriousness who happened to have a quick mouth and a sharp sense of humour - a rare combination ... which made her a shoo-in from the word go."

The other squatter, Ellen Brice, is an artist who specialises in "full nude sketches...similar to the ones she did in her life classes at art school."

"Each House is a Story of Failure"

You'll have to read the novel to appreciate what Auster does with this ensemble of "illegal trespassers, squatters, [and] freeloading bums". One hopes that these aren't the best years of their lives, even if it paints an accurate picture of 2008 and the years that followed.


SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)[
Leon Russell and the Shelter People - "The Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen"



"Teachers, learners, incense burners
Religious leaders and chronic bleeders
Thieves and pirates on a ride
It's a hippie commune bonafide"

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - "The Best Years of Our Lives"



The Black Keys - "Brooklyn Bound"



"I ain't got no money, no house on that hill"

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