Morris Heller, the protagonist’s father, is on an airplane watching an old Hollywood film (The Best Years of Our Lives), which deals with soldiers returning home from the Second World War and having to rebuild their lives; and what an old friend, a well-known writer, once told him comes to mind:

the idea he is toying with is to write an essay about things that do not happen, about the unlived lives, the unbought wars, the shadow world that runs parallel to the world we take to be real, the unsaid and the undone, the unremembered.
A hazardous territory, perhaps, but it might be worth exploring

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Miles Heller, Morris’s son, has a passion for photographing the belongings abandoned by those forced to vacate their homes in haste following an eviction notice.
He has no plans, no hopes; “piece by piece” he has reduced his desires to a bare minimum.
Why does a young man in his twenties, once a brilliant student, lead such an empty life? He is fleeing from guilt, from an existential malaise he cannot bring himself to confess: he is convinced he killed his stepbrother by pushing him under a car.
What drove him to disappear was an exchange he overheard between his father and his stepmother.

He is a brilliant boy, I admit it.
But cold, fragile, desperate, it chills me to think about his future.
(...) They were cutting him to pieces.
Carving him up with the calm, efficient strokes of pathologists at an autopsy, talking about him as if he were already a dead man walking.
(...) Perhaps the best thing for everyone would be to remove himself from their lives, to disappear

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His suffering runs so deep that he cannot even open up to a young girl with whom he has fallen deeply in love.
He met her by chance because both were reading The Great Gatsby, the emblematic novel of a forceful personality.
For a few pages, we hope that Miles might find in love the resolution to his anguish, regain his serenity, and be happy.
Yet he is forced to leave Florida in a frantic rush and return to New York, as he faces potential charges of statutory rape—his girlfriend has not yet reached the age of majority.
He accepts an invitation from a friend (Bing Nathan), who repairs all kinds of objects in a sort of “Hospital for Broken Things” and has taken up residence in an abandoned house alongside two young women: Ellen and Alice.
The narrative then shifts its focus to the stories of the other characters, just as it traces the lives of Miles’s parents: his father, his stepmother, and his mother.
We discover that each of them harbors an inner suffering, an unsaid and an unremembered: something they are incapable of expressing, acknowledging, or admitting.
As the narrative progresses, glimpses of light and prospects of hope seem to emerge: Miles gets in touch with his parents and finally confesses the reasons for his flight, seemingly freeing himself from his feelings of guilt.
Then everything plummets once more.
During the eviction of the squat by law enforcement, Miles lashes out, striking an officer.
Facing prison, he could turn himself in, yet chooses flight instead.

He wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and from now on, he tells himself, he will stop hoping for anything and live only for today, this moment, this passing instant, the today that is here and not here, the now that is gone forever

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Why? Perhaps we can never truly rid ourselves of the anguish within us; perhaps existence can only be endured by retreating into the mundanity of everyday life.

As in much of Auster’s fiction, an intellectualist imprint prevails; behind the characters’ refined psychology emerges a sense of contrivance, as though they were mere extras in an abstract line of reasoning, sealed within the author’s mind and largely detached from the actual mechanics of life.
Indeed, Miles, Bing, Ellen, Alice, and the rest are not the true subject of the tale: in the background lies New York, the cultured and refined milieu of intellectuals—an enclosure beyond which lies the real world, the one of which Auster either cannot or will not speak.

The narrative style is marked by sprawling periods in which commas separate clauses that are grammatically complete in their own right.
It flows like a river in spate, a relentless succession of words and syntactic structures; at first captivating and highlighting the author’s undeniable skill, but gradually growing tedious, turning the story into an extended soliloquy: is it Auster speaking? Is it an essay, or a novel?

Why not read it? Beautiful at first, it ultimately turns dull.

Sunset Park