Initial Reaction & Feminist Reaction to the end of Sunset Park

Well that was disappointing. I’m referring, of course, to the ending of Sunset Park, wherein everyone ruins their hopes and dreams by finally get evicted from the house. Auster built my hopes dramatically toward the end, as Alice, Ellen, Bing, Miles, and Morris all began having closure to their stories, but the final twenty pages caught me completely off guard.

Really, though, I suppose I shouldn’t have been terribly surprised. After all, these people had been living illegally in a house for months, and had gotten several eviction notices already. What was the alternative, realistically? I also shouldn’t have been surprised based on the rest of the book’s plot, since nothing ever turned out how I (and I assume most readers), wanted.

The ending left me with many unanswered questions. What ever happened with Willa? Did she accept Miles’ confession and forgive him, making Morris’ life easier? What happened to Alice’s computer? She worked so hard on that dissertation that I can’t bear the thought of it being forever lost. Could PEN help her get it back? I’m less concerned with the lives of Ellen and Bing, since Ellen seemed to be relatively blameless in the police invasion and Bing sort of asked for his fate. Also, both worked through their own issues, sort of, before the book ended. Also, why did Pilar suddenly decide to leave Florida for school in New York when she had previously been so adamant about staying near her family.

I think the end of the novel, for me, affirmed a lot of what the reviews said—there were just too many characters with too many details to realistically tie everything up. Maybe it was a statement by Auster, after all, that real life is messy and never quite tied up.

Regardless of the message, though, I can’t help but feel let down by Sunset Park. I believe that good novels should leave you questioning things, but not regarding the plot. The questions should be about the lessons learned, about your assumptions and how they were played out, about the novel’s impact on your own life and what that means. Not skipped-over plot points that leave me feeling unfulfilled.

From a feminist perspective, Sunset Park’s ending was just as, if not more, disappointing than it was from the initial reader-response reaction. Auster wrapped up (if you can even call it “wrapping up”) all of the female characters in ways that leave the characters unfinished and, more importantly, oppressed.

Ellen, whose appearance was one of the first things mentioned about her, was framed as a character who was attractive but felt ugly inside. The narrator set readers up to ask the question, “Why is such a pretty girl so sexually frustrated?” Of course, the answer was that she had been impregnated, a plight only ever experienced by women, and abandoned by boy she didn’t even feel comfortable enough to tell. She bore unspeakable amounts of pain simply because she thought it wasn’t the boy’s problem—it was hers since she was the one with the womb. Due to the pressures of society viewing young, single, pregnant women as promiscuous and irresponsible, she aborted the child. Auster wraps up her story not with a redeeming transformation of character for herself, but with a transformation for a man—the same man who used her for sex and abandoned her nine years before. The narrator originally says that the change in appearance was just a reflection of a change in her “innermost self,” but goes on to say that her transformation was “inspired” by meeting Ben Samuels again, so apparently her innermost self is just a reflection of the man she’s dating at the time. So Ellen gets a boyfriend and a makeover and suddenly she is a whole person again and the novel is over.

Alice, who stands out from the other Sunset Park characters as the “normal one,” struggles with her self-image and her boyfriend. Original. I find it interesting, and a double standard, that Bing, who is unofficially described as the least attractive housemate, doesn’t seem to worry much about his looks, his weight, etc. He is even comfortable enough to pose nude for Ellen. Alice, however, deems herself unfit due to the fact that she doesn’t feel she meets society’s standards for an attractive woman despite the fact that she is, at most, only a little bit overweight for her height. Alice finally breaks up with her boyfriend toward the end of the novel, and instead of complimenting her empowerment or remarking on her intellectual abilities, Auster writes that Ellen is sure “it won’t be long before Alice finds herself another man.” Because that’s the end-all-be-all of womanly success and happiness.

Finally, Miles’ girlfriend Pilar, who at the beginning of the novel is committed to staying close to her remaining family in Florida while she’s in college, ends up dropping everything and moving to New York with her boyfriend (assuming he wasn’t put in jail for an extended amount of time). No matter that the only thing waiting for them in New York was Miles’ family who he didn’t even tell her about and a more expensive education than she would have received in Florida. In the end, it was the woman (well, girl) who gave up everything instead of the man, despite the fact that the only mistake Pilar made in her life was falling for a man who kept a lot of secrets from her.

This is not to say that the women in Sunset Park were the only ones suffering. Miles, Bing, and Morris all had a lot of issues to deal with themselves. In the end, though, they all received real, not superficial or sacrificial, change. Miles, before he punched a police officer, reconciled his relationship with his parents and seemed to be coming to terms with his brother’s death. Bing began working out the questions he had about his sexuality in a judgment-free zone. Morris deepened his relationship with his son and his wife, and was forgiven for having an affair. It seems a bit unbalanced to me.