Reconfiguring the Male: Masculinities beyond Capitalism in Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

Abstract

Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, published in 2010, has been defined by the literary press as a conscious exercise in “credit crunch fiction” (Lawson) that is, as a textual attempt to represent how the failure of capitalism in the West has affected citizens. This failure has occasioned a crisis that can hardly be considered only economic; it is also political, ideological, and, perhaps, even spiritual. A quick online search reveals that, on the whole, the reviewers of Auster’s latest novel do not consider it to have been successful in its enterprise; as a matter of fact, they do not even consider it to be one of the writer’s best fictional works. To give just one example, it is Mark Lawson’s opinion, as expressed in his review written for The Guardian, that the novel simply falls short of its objective. As Lawson would have it, Sunset Park is nothing but a poor attempt to portray the complexity of the predicament of the Western world, whose unflagging belief in the solidity and stability of capitalism and consumerist lifestyles, has been suddenly shattered. Lawson argues that, instead of providing us with a crude picture of this drama, the novel is a lifeless, stilted piece.