A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: In Sunset Park the kaleidoscopic perspective is taken a step further as the story about five major characters and their inner lives breaks into several narrative points of view. The portraits are sketched with more empathy than ever before as Morris Heller nearly goes mad with worry when his son, Miles, runs away from home and his marriage begins to fall apart. Miles spends more than a year photographing abandoned things in vacant houses, then, forced to leave Florida because of his relationship with a minor, Pilar, he returns to Brooklyn to become a squatter in a derelict house with his friend, Bing Nathan, who runs the Hospital for Broken Things, and two women equally absorbed in their work: Ellen in her pornographic drawings and Alice in her doctoral research.

PA: Yes, Alice has been studying the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives for her dissertation on postwar America, and this is significant for the book as a whole, which is a kind of multi-generational portrait of America in the present moment. I consciously thought of it that way.

IBS: Most of the book revolves around a derelict house that was actually situated in Sunset Park here in Brooklyn, wasn’t it?

PA: It was a real place, yes. I roamed around the neighborhood a few times, and one morning I came to a street that runs along the edge of Green-Wood Cemetery, with vacant lots and a partially built house that had clearly been abandoned in mid-construction. The wooden house was on that street. It was boarded up. No one lived there. I couldn’t get inside, of course, but I took about a dozen pictures of the house, and I kept them on my desk while I was writing the book. My descriptions of the house are taken directly from the real thing. After the book was published—in November 2010—National Public Radio wanted to do an interview with me, and the journalist suggested that we do it while walking around Sunset Park. I said, “Okay, let’s go to the house first.” When we arrived, it wasn’t there anymore! It had been demolished. My photos were the only evidence that the house had ever existed—just as the only traces left of Miles’s “abandoned things” are the photos he’s taken of them. I felt I had been thrust into the world of my own fiction. Very strange.

PA: I know. Even so, the book has a kind of documentary quality to it. There are many real events woven into the fictional events in the novel. Green-Wood Cemetery is a real place, of course, and so are the people I mention who are buried there. All the baseball players are real; their deaths took place when and how I’ve described them. PEN and the Freedom to Write Program, all that is true. Steve Cochran was a real actor who died that strange death on the boat with those women—and yes, my mother apparently dated him for a while when she was young. This was the first time I ever set out to write a book located in the Now, with a capital N. Some of the real events I wrote about in the book had taken place just two or three months earlier, so, in effect, I found myself writing a chronicle of the moment—and what a rough moment it was: the closest thing to the Great Depression we’ve experienced in my lifetime. It was an odd feeling, I have to say, because I had never written a novel (as opposed to autobiographical works) in the space of the present. All my novels (nearly everyone’s novels, for that matter) are set in the past. This one was set in the present.

IBS: Sunset Park revolves around a specific identifiable place: the house. It’s described in different ways depending on who is speaking. It’s almost as if there’s a correlation between house and character. From Bing’s perspective, it’s

a dopey little two-story wooden house with a roofed-over front porch, looking for all the world like something that had been stolen from a farm on the Minnesota prairie and plunked down by accident in the middle of New York. (80–81)

[t]he house is like no house he has ever seen in New York . . . but this house in Sunset Park is neither suburban nor historic, it is merely a shack, a forlorn piece of architectural stupidity that would not fit in anywhere, neither in New York nor out of it. (124–125)

IBS: Yes, Miles is a little more reflective. Ellen sees the house almost exclusively from “inside.” I mean, she rarely goes out, and when she finally does, it’s because she has been “transformed by love.” Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it seems to me that Ellen, much more so than any of the other core characters, lives so much “on the inside”—inside herself and inside the house.

PA: That’s true. Even if she does have a job and goes to the office every day. It’s just that we don’t see her engaged in those activities. She also visits her sister and the baby. It’s one of the good moments for her in the book.

IBS: Even so, there’s very little action in Sunset Park. The book centers almost exclusively on portraits formed on the basis of reports from the inside perspective of each character.

PA: Each section catches a character in the middle of something and then the narrative spreads out from that moment, sometimes going backward into the past. The characters remember their lives and sometimes reflect on their memories. It’s almost like a series of tableaux. An example of that approach would be when Ellen gets up early one foggy but warm December Sunday. Everyone in the house is asleep, and she’s just standing on the porch thinking about who she is, who she’s been, who she wants to be. There are other scenes like that: New Year’s Eve, when Morris is alone in his apartment, or when Alice sits down to watch The Best Years of Our Lives for the twenty-eighth time—then remembers her grandparents. Yes, that’s the way the book works. It’s true, there’s very little action. Miles falls in love with Pilar, he gets into a squabble with her sister, and he leaves Florida for New York. Morris has an affair, marital problems ensue, and his business is in trouble. Bing, Ellen, and Alice become squatters. Those are the important events. Alice breaks up with her boyfriend. Mary-Lee plays Winnie in Happy Days. Bing poses for Ellen. Little action, as you say, because most of the book takes place inside the heads of the characters.

PA: Mostly because I’ve been growing into a new way of writing sentences. I think it started in Invisible, but in Sunset Park I broke through into something else: there are sentences that go on for two or three pages. I’ve rarely done that before, but it seemed to me that these long, propulsive run-ons were better at capturing the meanderings of thought and reflection than short sentences. Not quite stream-of-consciousness, but something similar. It gives momentum and urgency to the characters’ thoughts partly because it doesn’t pretend or seek to be logical—it’s associative. So you follow the twists and turns. I must say it’s galvanizing to write like that. One gets swept along, and another kind of force field is generated in the process.

IBS: I felt there was almost a Proustian quality to some of those sentences that go on and on. Then, by association, of course, I thought about the name Swann.

PA: I loved the name “Mary-Lee Swann.” What better name for an actress? And I’ll tell you, one of the things I enjoyed doing most in the book was the Mary-Lee chapter. When she’s waiting for Miles to come to her apartment for dinner, she’s in an absolute frazzle. She changes her clothes four times, she orders two different dinners, her mind is spinning like a gyroscope.

IBS: Yes, she really comes off the page. Morris Heller is perhaps your most decent—most human—character ever. He has integrity, he suffers, he copes with suffering: his own and that of others. One immediately warms to him.

IBS: All the characters are described with tremendous compassion. For instance, here, through the narrator’s take on Bing’s unrequited love for Miles:

[I]n the same way you have already vanished from his heart, have never been in his heart, have never been in anyone’s heart, not even your own. (224)

IBS: One of my favorite passages in Sunset Park is when Morris reflects on the compulsion of his best friend and his former wife to express themselves artistically:

He has never been able to put his finger on the line that separates life from art. Renzo is the same as Mary-Lee, they are both prisoners of what they do, for years both have been plunging forward from one project to the next, both have produced lasting works of art, and yet their lives have been a bollix, both divorced twice, both with a tremendous talent for self-pity, both ultimately inaccessible to others—not failed human beings, exactly, but not successful either. Damaged souls. The walking wounded, opening their veins and bleeding in public. (192)

[d]rumming has always been a way for him to scream, and Ellen’s new drawings have turned into screams as well. (249)

PA: Yes, I’m afraid to say: suffering is the principle source of creativity. There’s no question about it. Perfectly happy people, if there are any, don’t need to write novels or play the drums.

IBS: I think perhaps some of your best writing ever is in these portraits. They are so vivid and moving.

PA: Writing this book utterly drained me. I wrote it in an astonishing burst—and then, complete mental and physical exhaustion. It’s taken me all this time⁷³ even to begin to think about writing more fiction.

IBS: You must have put a lot of work into the tailoring of style to match the inner states of the individual characters. For instance, you suddenly use stage directions in passages describing Mary-Lee Swann and diary form toward the end when communication between Morris and his wife, Willa, has come to a halt. These fairly abrupt shifts into another mode immediately link form and content, I think, and they strengthen the individual portraits. In previous novels you have changed style and tone in mid-chapter—but not genre, right? Let’s look at that first difficult reunion of Mary-Lee and Miles when, suddenly, you weave in stage directions that hugely enhance the awkwardness of the moment:

If you still cared, why run away in the first place?

That’s the big question, isn’t it? (Pause. Another sip of wine.) Because I thought you’d be better off without me—all of you. (262)

The narrative switches over into Mary-Lee Swann’s mode as the most natural thing in the world. It’s as if a screenplay is being written for her, which is appropriate, given that she’s an actress. We’re in her world.

PA: Most of those things just came to me—without much conscious thought. But they felt right.

IBS: The intricate structure adds to the urgency, I think. The four parts are sharply focused and very dense. Two are named after father and son, Miles and Morris Heller, each divided into four numbered chapters. One is dedicated to Bing Nathan and Company and comprises four chapters, each named after a member of the group. The last part, simply entitled “All,” consists of eight chapters bearing the names of six central characters. So, you use names in some headings and numbers in others. Why is that?

PA: Miles and Morris are the two most significant characters, and they stand out individually, while Bing is part of the group: “Bing Nathan and Company.” That’s why the different chapters in that section are named after the four members. The structure reflects this hierarchy of importance.

IBS: It makes a fine symmetry, doesn’t it, where chapter division and character hierarchy go hand in hand: 4 + 4 + 4 + 8.

PA: The fact is, I’m always thinking about numbers when I compose my books. For a long time, I only wanted to write books—this is a weird confession—with an odd number of chapters, so there would be one chapter that fell dead center. There are just three of my books that don’t have chapters but sections. Mr. Vertigo, Invisible, and Sunset Park. Those are the only books with even numbers [laughs]. I always thought of Invisible as three parts and an epilogue, and in Mr. Vertigo it’s essentially the same, three parts and an epilogue. Then there are the books of continuous writing, with no chapters at all—Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, In the Country of Last Things. In Ghosts there aren’t even any breaks. But four somehow seemed right for Sunset Park, a perfect square.

IBS: It seems to me that there are several new and very exciting avenues in Sunset Park: the present-tense mode, for instance, the run-on sentences, the tailoring of genre to match particular thoughts and moods in a given character. You also play with narrative perspective in a different way. Except in the last section on Morris Heller where you switch to the second-person point of view, everything is reported by a third-person narrator who is entirely omniscient—even, in one instance, to the point of moving freely between Morris Heller’s journal and narrative reality.⁷⁴ There is little direct speech, little dialogue, very few direct exchanges between characters. Even so, there’s a high level of understanding and compassion between them. That’s most unusual, isn’t it?

PA: Most of the characters are alone throughout most of the book. They’re remembering conversations, which are summarized in the narrative. That passage where Mary-Lee and Miles are reunited is one of the few times we actually have two people together. There’s also the dinner at the restaurant with Morris, Mary-Lee, and her husband, Korngold. Bing and Miles talk at times, so do Alice and Ellen. Actually, maybe there’s more direct communication than you think.

IBS: Very often, we see the characters only through several layers of narration, for instance, when Miles is introduced to the squat, it’s only through Alice’s-report-of-Bing’s-description-of-Miles.

A man named Miles Heller will be joining them tomorrow or the day after. Bing says he is hands down the smartest, most interesting person he has ever known. (92)

Or, more radically, at one of the peak moments in the story, when the effects on Miles of the first call to his mother in over seven years are reported—not by Miles, but by Bing:

How did she sound? Very well, Miles says. She called him a no-good shithead, an imbecile, and a rotten coward, but then she cried, then they both cried, and afterward her voice became warm and affectionate, she talked to him with far more kindness than he deserved, and hearing her again after all these years was almost too much for him. He regrets everything, he says. (250)

Why the distance here? After all, it’s one of the most important moments in the story. Why will you not let us have a more direct glimpse of Miles?

PA: The indirection makes it more powerful. I describe how Bing is assimilating information. That’s how we learn things in the book, almost always through another point of view.

IBS: It certainly has an interesting effect on the reader. We’re doubly removed from the scene, and, at the same time, privileged by a very private and intimate take on the different characters and what goes on between them. I haven’t seen this before, certainly not in your writing, this stepping back at peak moments only to provide more clarity.

IBS: I think it works extremely well. Look at the way Pilar speaks. It’s always through Miles, and his tone changes when he reports her speech. We never hear Pilar herself.

IBS: Exactly! It’s speech doubly reported: twice removed from the object and yet strangely intimate. And it’s not a mode of narration consciously constructed?

PA: No, the spirit of the book was so alive for me, I didn’t have to ask any questions. I knew what I wanted it to sound like. I knew the tone. I always do. Every book is born out of some inner music, some sense of music, and the music of each book is different from the music of every other book. I can hear it—and therefore I know what it’s supposed to sound like. I think I’m repeating myself, but all I can say is that this is how it feels to me while I’m working. I’m lost in the book—the whole book, the totality of the book, even as I’m working on the individual parts of the book. I have a sense of how everything is supposed to connect. So much of it has to do with tone, and tone is all about sentences: writing the words correctly.

IBS: So, the tone shifts according to character, mood, emotion, thought—even age, for instance, when Alice remembers herself as a child thinking about Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie:

[A]nd then came the news about a man living in England who had published a book that angered so many people in distant parts of the world that the bearded leader of one country actually stood up and declared that the man in England should be killed for what he had written. (227)

PA: I’m glad you’re so sensitive to this. Many people don’t get these shifts of tone.

IBS: I guess it’s my job to notice these things [laughs]. Tone is crucial also in connection with Pilar. She’s the most important of the female characters, right? Even so, she doesn’t have a voice of her own, and, unlike Alice, Ellen, and Mary-Lee, she doesn’t have her own chapter. Why is that?

PA: It wasn’t necessary. You learn everything about her through other points of view. Pilar is essential, but I wanted to leave a blank. Even so, there are many intimate passages about her. Remember when Miles has a vision of her future:

He wasn’t telling her what to do, he was merely asking her to consider the matter carefully, to weigh the consequences of accepting or turning down what in all likelihood would be offered to her, and for once Pilar was silent, not willing to share her thoughts with him, and he didn’t press her to say anything, for it was clear from the look in her eyes that she was already pondering this very question, trying to project herself into the future, trying to imagine what going to college in New York would mean to her or not mean to her, and as they walked among the deserted grounds and studied the facades of the buildings, he felt as if she were changing in front of him, growing older in front of him, and he suddenly understood what she would be like ten years from now, twenty years from now, Pilar in the full vigor of her evolving womanhood, Pilar all grown into herself and yet still walking with the shadow of the pensive girl walking beside him now, the young woman walking beside him now. (206–207)

It didn’t seem necessary to give her a chapter of her own. She’s so present.

IBS: In terms of action, the pivotal moment in Sunset Park is when Miles overhears Morris and Willa discussing him in the kitchen:

They were chopping him into pieces, dismembering him with the calm and efficient strokes of a pathologist conducting a post-mortem, talking about him as if they thought he was already dead. (29)

This is when he decides to disappear, and so, like several of your male protagonists, he abandons everything on the spur of the moment.

PA: Yes, it’s a sudden decision. There are people in my novels who throw everything to the four winds and leave, and, of course, divestment has been one of our themes in these discussions. Think of Nashe in The Music of Chance. He has his reasons for disappearing: his wife has left him, he’s inherited a lot of money, so he feels free to do what he wants.

PA: Marco does it. He’s evicted from his apartment, but of course, in his case it’s willful and self-sabotaging. There are ninety ways he could have stayed there, but the boy’s brain is addled, and he believes in the spiritual value of passivity [laughs]. Who else is there? Benjamin Sachs takes off. That’s because he’s killed someone. Hector Mann takes off as well. Another murder, but not one he committed himself.

PA: With Miles, it’s a little different: radical but not so abrupt. Bobby’s death has been eating away at him for a long time. Then he overhears the fatal conversation between his father and stepmother. It’s so devastating to him that he runs away.

IBS: And abandons everything. Of course, your interest in abandoned things is taken to another level in Sunset Park: here it has become a regular job to clear them out of the empty houses. Miles not only removes these traces of absent people’s lives—he also takes it upon himself to record them. It’s announced already in the opening line: “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.” Later, Miles is stirred by his realization that

[t]here were the abandoned things down in Florida, and now he has stumbled upon the abandoned people of Brooklyn. He suspects it is a terrain well worth exploring. (133)

PA: I read an article in the New York Times about these trash-out workers. It made a big impression on me, and I gave that job to Miles because it seemed to fit his personality.

IBS: I can see why it would make an impression on you. You’ve been writing about this for more than thirty years [laughs].

PA: [Laughs] Perhaps. But I never knew there was such a job—trash-out worker, subcontracted by the banks that have foreclosed on unpaid mortgages.

IBS: It’s trash removal only, right? They’re not hired to make a record of what was left behind in these houses.

PA: It’s his own idea. The other guys are stealing things, but Miles just takes his photos. He doesn’t want things. He wants the pictures of things, the images rather than the objects.

IBS: Since In the Country of Last Things you’ve had people collecting trash, treasuring objects left behind, renaming broken items, writing about them. As I see it, these acts serve to situate or to preserve the abandoned things—if only for a little while.

PA: That’s right. Here, as in Smoke, things are captured and recorded—not in words but in pictures.

IBS: Ellen is also seeking to represent an absence in her somewhat disturbing drawings:

She wanted to make pictures that would evoke the mute wonder of pure thingness, the holy ether breathing in the spaces between things, a translation of human existence into a minute rendering of all that is out there beyond us, around us, in the same way she knows the invisible graveyard is standing there in front of her, even if she cannot see it. (115)

PA: Yes, the thingness of that which you can touch. Ellen is looking for a kind of transcendence in the actual. Think of the effect Vermeer can have on an attentive viewer. Everything just as ordinary as can be, a woman looking out a window—but you feel that you’re in the presence of something holy and eternal. Even if I don’t believe in God, I feel a divine presence when I look at Vermeer. That’s what Ellen is trying to achieve in her art.

IBS: At the same time, she’s recording something broken, isn’t she, a kind of inner disconnection or blank?

She is advancing now, travelling deeper and deeper into the netherworld of her own nothingness, the place in her that coincides with what she is not. (215)

PA: I think she’s vanishing from herself, and in doing so she sees herself from a different perspective. We were talking about this the other day in relation to love. How it is that in giving yourself away, disappearing from yourself, you open up the connecting space between two people—the between. Here, it’s not about two people; it’s happening inside her. Ellen is a troubled person, continually on the edge of breaking down. Let’s see . . .

The sky above her is gray or blue or white, sometimes yellow or red, at times purple. The earth below her is green or brown. Her body stands at the juncture of earth and sky, and it belongs to her and no one else. Her thoughts belong to her. Her desires belong to her. Stranded in the realm of the one, she conjures up the two and three and four and five. Sometimes the six. Sometimes even the sixty. (215)

It’s a statement of her disarray. She feels that she’s evaporating, and she’s trying to bring herself back to life. This paragraph doesn’t really explicate Ellen’s confusion, it embodies it, enacts the process of thinking.

IBS: It’s also that fruitful moment of creativity, right? It’s the place “in between” where things happen, the blank that triggers and prompts and determines. It changes from book to book, but “the place of nothingness” is a recurring figure in your writing. Basically, it’s what we’ve been calling “white spaces,” isn’t it?

PA: Yes, it’s a kind of metaphysical void, but it can also be in the room, inside a person, or a person out under the sky, the incomprehensible bigness. Melville’s “howling infinite.”

IBS: It’s interesting here: “her own nothingness.” You haven’t said that before. Quinn in City of Glass seeks a “nothingness,” and “he was finally nowhere” toward the end of the story. Marco also reaches a dead end in Moon Palace and eventually learns the importance of leaping across blank spaces.

stranded in the middle of nowhere. By late afternoon, you have begun to resign yourself to the fact that nowhere is your home now and that is where you will be spending the last years of your life. (282)

“Nowhere” here refers to the inconstant place where Morris finds himself abandoned by both his wife and son while at the same time feeling torn between them. It’s a kind of exaggerated comment on the fact that, like so many characters in my books, Morris is trying to come to terms with ambiguity. Things are not going to be resolved, and he has to learn to live with it. This is what he’s teaching himself.

PA: He refuses to abandon either one, even if Willa wants nothing to do with Miles anymore. One senses, however, that Willa will eventually come around. She really does love Morris, and I think they’ll get over their problems. His near-death has changed everything, and she’s going to forgive Miles. The question is whether Miles is going to forgive himself. We get a last glimpse of him traveling across the Brooklyn Bridge.

IBS: You’ve left several questions open, and we’re uncertain about how it ends. There was now a second act of violence, which makes you think that, perhaps, the first violent act was not quite as innocent as we want to believe. Maybe there is something to it, after all, maybe he actually did push Bobby out in front of the car deliberately.

PA: I wanted it to be uncertain. Miles is in despair again. He’s worked so hard for so many years not to be the person-who-punches, and now he’s punched again. Even though it was probably justified (he was defending Alice, after all), he still feels terrible about what he’s done. Objectively speaking, however, it’s not the end of the world. He might be charged with assaulting a police officer, but since it’s a first offense, he’ll probably get off with a fine or a suspended sentence. His future is not so bleak. It just feels bleak to him at that moment.

IBS: Since Sunset Park came out in 2010, you’ve written the two autobiographical works, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, and you told me the other day that you are now working on fiction again.

PA: Yes, I’ve started a new book. If I can pull it off, it may become a big book. I’ve been enjoying myself so far, and every day I sit at my desk and tell myself how lucky I am to be doing this. Bit by bit by bit, I think I’ve become better at what I do. In some way, each book has been better than the one before it. Or rather, I’ve kept pushing toward a greater understanding of what it is I do or what I’m trying to say. Failing better, as it were. I don’t know, does this make sense?

IBS: Yes, we’ve talked about this before, when you said it’s as if there’s a rhythm of alternation between big books and small books, complex books and simple books. It makes perfect sense that the writing has become sharper, bolder, and more intricate in a simpler form. I mean, in a book like Sunset Park there’s so much going on inside a simple frame and a reasonably ordinary cast of characters. Personally, I think Sunset Park is an absolute masterpiece. But, of course, it depends on what criteria you use when you talk about good books.