I took the three of these on the plane to the States with me — I’ve been away for just over a week for my nephew’s high school graduation and a family party — and they proved to be undemanding and reasonably diverting company. All: 
Sunset Park by Paul Auster (2010)
After reading Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories, I found myself hankering to try more by her late husband. This is a fairly good novel about sexual boundaries and the ongoing impact of secrets on families. Miles Heller is living in Florida, clearing out abandoned houses. He’s 29 and has been estranged from his parents — actress mother Mary-Lee, publisher father Morris — for seven years, moving from place to place and doing odd jobs but never letting anyone know where he’s living. He’s never told anyone that he believes his stepbrother Bobby’s death was his fault. When he falls in love with a Cuban American high school student named Pilar Sanchez, one of the girl’s older sisters threatens to call the police on him for sleeping with someone underage unless he steals them stuff from the foreclosed houses. To escape potential consequences, he joins his old friend Bing Nathan at a squat in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, right across from Green-Wood cemetery. What he doesn’t know is that Bing has been reporting on his movements to his parents all along.
The omniscient narration moves between Miles, his parents, and the three other residents of the squat, with no speech marks throughout and one section in the second person. The prose is so fluid that the pages turn incredibly quickly, but even when he’s inhabiting women’s perspectives you feel a male presence in Auster’s work. There can be something a little distasteful in his writing about sex. If being charitable, I would say that all these examples (the underage girlfriend, having anal sex to avoid pregnancy, infidelity, housemate Ellen’s pornographic drawings, a man being in love with his male best friend) are a way of exploring the lines we draw around sex and whether they are fundamental or arbitrary. But when you’re reading it, it just feels prurient.
Auster’s pet loves of baseball (Hustvedt in Ghost Stories: “Year-round, Paul yakked to me about the Mets”) and film are here through Miles’s and Morris’s shared passion for baseball and housemate Alice’s dissertation work on The Best Years of Our Lives, a charming (or should that be sentimental?) postwar movie I watched back when I was working my way through the American Film Institute’s top 100 list in my high school and college years. Between that, the glimpse of the publishing industry through Morris and Alice’s work for PEN trying to get justice for an exiled Chinese writer, there are a number of appealing elements, but they don’t all come together in any particularly meaningful way. Definitely second-tier work from him. I know I have a lot of better ones still to come. (Secondhand — Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Whale Fall by David Baker (2022)
I’d never heard of Baker, even though he’s a prolific and well-respected American practitioner of eco-poetry. Nature poetry is usually right up my street, so I was keen to give this a try. The long title sequence intersperses statistics about whale journeys and ocean plastics with the poet’s memories of Cold War alarmism and current chronic health issues. There are descriptions of riverside and forest scenes, worries about an ageing father, references to Turner’s paintings of clouds, concerns about wildfires, and so on. I quite liked “Storm Psalm” and “Middle Devonian,” but there are not many other standouts overall. The stanza and line arrangements vary a good bit, with most poems ranging across several pages in numbered sections or parts separated by asterisks. Apart from a bit of alliteration, I didn’t notice a lot in the way of technique. I feel almost churlish for not appreciating this more, but it didn’t speak to me, and there were some sentimental tics, as in the brief poem below. (Secondhand — hospital book sale)
“Extinction”
When you are gone they will read your footprints,
if they still read, as they might a poem about love—
wandering in circles, here and there obscured,
washed out in places by weather, sudden landslide.
Keep walking, pilgrim. This is your great tale.
Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis (2012)
That I read the whole thing on the flight tells you that this collection of 23 micro-essays was addictive in a popcorn sort of way. Ellis is more sassy than introspective when writing about her Alabama upbringing versus her married, childfree adulthood in New York City and the etiquette that she espouses. She quotes her mother’s dictums and gives translations of phrases one might use when trying to be polite: “I’m put together. ‘Put together’ is Southern Lady Code for you can take me to church or Red Lobster and I’ll fit in fine.” She writes about reality TV, reporting pornography on Twitter (but not before enjoying it privately), her belief in ghosts, and her beauty routines for an ageing body — her debt to Nora Ephron is clearest in “Seven Things I’m Doing Instead of a Neck Lift.” I especially enjoyed one essay about her affinity for gay men (I was reminded of Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist). The best sequence of three pieces covers making kitschy 1970s finger food for her annual holiday party, tips for how to be a good guest, and the art of the thank-you note.
But, often, I found the book quite shallow, and mentions of how much she spends on outfits rubbed me the wrong way. (I’d somehow encountered the essay on accidentally switching another woman’s Burberry coat for her own before.) “Serious Women” is the least fluffy with its account of a sordid murder trial she attended because her friend was the assistant district attorney. There were other little mentions of incidents I wished she’d had the courage to take on in full, such as her rape and her and her husband’s collective loss of parents and a brother. Still, I liked Ellis’s writing enough that I’d definitely read her short story collection, American Housewife. (Secondhand — Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
So none of these were stellar books, but I’m pleased to have read them because they were all “just-because” books from my shelves. No challenge or deadline drove me to them; I picked them up simply because I felt like reading them. Which is what I think summer reading is supposed to be about.
Graduation and party pics:
My U.S. book haul (the Houston is signed; the Carson is a review copy, out at the end of July):
I couldn’t figure out how to log in to WordPress from the laptop I borrowed from my sister while I was away, so I’ll be catching up on blogs and comments the rest of this week. I read most of two other books during my trip and will write those up soon.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Thanks, Rebecca, especially for your review of Auster’s book.We didn’t find Auster’s writing about sex prurient. Well, but we are neither American nor English. But we find ‘Sunset Park’ not his best text (that’s for us ‘Moonshine Palace’)
The Fab Four of Cley:-) 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Moon Palace is definitely one I will target. (I suppose I was thinking also about the incest in Invisible.)
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It looks like a nice trip! I want to do some more “just because” reading even if the book isn’t on my TBR. Sometimes the books just call to you!
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I’m going to try to do lots of it this summer, even beyond my chosen 20.
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I think this is just the right attitude about summer reading. I’m happy I have so much more Auster to read, even if it’s not all great.
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Even subpar Auster is better than many a contemporary novelist can manage!
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It’s interesting to hear your take on Helen Ellis’s nonfiction. American Housewife is not more thoughtful or reflective, in my recollection; it feels sort of like a bit that’s been stretched out. I think at the time I’d not read anything quite like it, but in retrospect, I don’t think I would now have the patience for its manneredness. That may or may not change your willingness to pick it up! (Southern Lady Code is a whole thing, as you will know from growing up in Maryland, and Southernness and class/wealth are extremely interconnected things in a way that comes closer to being English than most other aspects of American sociology – but the relentless cataloguing of money spent on outfits strikes me as crass, and I dislike this sort of “professional Southerner” persona anyway.)
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Ah, okay, sounds like I’m not missing anything with American Housewife! It’s the kind of thing we might have read for Literary Wives club. My library used to hold the e-book but doesn’t anymore, so I’ll rule it out.
Maryland is borderline and most of the time doesn’t feel Southern, but I do somewhat claim Southern heritage because of my dad being from Georgia.
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Yes, true – it’s a bit like Delaware in that sense. (Was slave-holding, but culturally doesn’t feel like Old or Deep South.) But Georgia definitely counts!
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Congratulations to your nephew, and I hope you’ve had a good time in the States! I’ve read Ellis’s American Housewife but remember nothing about it and gave it three stars on Goodreads, so not a ringing endorsement…
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I had a good trip — restful in that I didn’t take any work with me, so just got to read for fun; but there was a lot of prep to do for the party, so I wasn’t just a guest.
You and Elle have convinced me to ditch American Housewife from my TBR.
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Hope you have a great trip Rebecca. That’s an Auster I haven’t read before, but sounds like a middling one.
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Auster is never less than readable.
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Interesting to hear about the Auster! I’ve only read the New York Trilogy and would like to read more, but I think this might not be the best choice…
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Check with Annabel, but there will surely be many better ones for you to continue with!
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Lovely pictures, Rebecca. Your nephew looks very happy! I started off as an Auster fane but changed my loyalties to Hustvedt. Looking forward to reading Ghost Stories.
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He’s a good kid. I say ‘kid’, but he’s now 18, which is hard for me to believe as I have clear memories of holding him when he was a few months old.
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Looks like a nice visit, and I hope you’re safely back in England now, since our weather here has turned so incredibly hot and muggy! I think you’re right about summer reading. I’m a little more happy to DNF in the summer. I haven’t decided if I’m going to do that with Wellness. (I think I remember we both really liked his The Nix.) The Pam Houston is a great score. Have you heard about the Parnassus Books (Ann Patchett) book of the month, club? 3, 6, or 12 signed first edition (literary fiction mostly) books, delivered–it’s going to be my go-to for my reader friends who are impossible to buy gifts for.
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It was hot on a few days that I was there, including for the party, but bearable. I was happy to come back to cool, showery weather in England.
I loved Wellness just as much as The Nix, but if you’re not feeling it, move on to something else and save your precious leisure reading time!
Book subscriptions are nice, though pricey, gifts. No doubt Parnassus would have great taste.
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Glad you had a good trip and well done on getting three 20BOS26 done (I’m about to finish my second one, hopefully reviewing tomorrow along with the first). Good to clear these off the piles to make room for more successful ones!
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I’ve actually finished another three now; it’s just a question of when I manage to write them up!
That’s always a subsidiary goal of this challenge: to make space on my shelves for the new acquisitions that will hopefully work out for me a little bit better.
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Even though I’ve consistently enjoyed everything of Auster’s that I’ve read, I’m not sure that, in my mind, anything has given me the same feeling that I had with The New York Trilogy. That sense of “right”ness when it was over. But I still like being in his brain. Single-sitting reads are less common when one’s stack is sprawling, so it’s a particular delight to “find” one, and as others have said, I love your “just because” choices. That’s been a Thing for me with my library loans of late, although the projects are ongoing. It’s just… fun, eh?
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The New York Trilogy (particularly its first volume) is certainly a standout. But I know there are still a few major ones I haven’t gotten to yet.
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