Mounir

The Overstory is really a lengthy love letter to trees more than it is a novel. Almost everything in the book is tied to trees in one way or another. The characters and plot all seem secondary to this tree theme. At the same time, though, the book follows nine different characters. It can be hard to keep them all straight and stay invested in all of them. Really my biggest complaint is that the book is probably twice as long as it needs to be to tell the same story. You'll find yourself reading a loving and vivid description of a tree or a laundry list of tree facts about every 10 pages. However beautifully written, these tree digressions wear thin after some time. The book is spread so thin across its many characters that many of them felt flat to me.

Despite all my complaints, the beginning of the book works pretty well as a collection of short stories. I think you also get the overall message that we should respect trees more from just those first 150 or so pages.

This book is definitely not for everyone, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's incredibly long and very slowly paced, but it's also intricately detailed, and methodically planned. On one level, it's a tale about the four different ways a young man's life could go. On another level, it's a vivid picture of life in New York in the 1960s, with special emphasis placed on political and social turmoil. It's also a bit of a love letter to literature, poetry, and the act of writing. Perhaps the most compelling part of the book to me were the vividly realized characters. It was hard to imagine that they were all simply inventions from Auster's mind and not real people. It may be difficult for some readers to commit to such a long and slow read, but if you're willing to live in this world for a long time, Auster will take you on an interesting and compelling journey.

Sunset Park follows a small gang of young adults in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and features many Auster hallmarks. It's largely set in New York City, is full of baseball trivia, and lots of intertextual references. I found Sunset Park to be a mostly okay novel, if a little unfocused. The story changes perspectives frequently, often moving away from the most interesting characters to check in with someone else.

My first big gripe is that the protagonist is a far fetched character if there ever was one. He is excessively gloomy and stubborn, while also being completely magnetic to every other character. I just didn't find him to be at all believable, even in Auster's fantasy land.

Another problem to me was the prevalence of inappropriate relationships between minors and adults. Several different characters had sexual relationships with teenagers that were ultimately justified by the story. Auster acknowledges the weirdness of it, but dismisses it. It feels like he wasn't sure why exactly these relationships are inappropriate.

As other reviews have said, the biggest problem comes at the very end. The ending is extremely abrupt, bleak, and ambiguous. It really soured me on the whole book that came before.

I would give this book a pass. There are some nice moments, but I found it to be the weakest Auster novel I've read.