Though he was galvanized by the 49ers’ surprising success this season, Ferlinghetti made it clear in the article that, all in all, he considers the NFL too violent and finds soccer and baseball more compelling than American football. Soccer is “like chess when you really pay attention to it,” the poet claimed. “In soccer, they never stop,” he added, bemoaning the many whistles and downs and commercial breaks of a typical NFL game.

In drawing this contrast between football and soccer, Ferlinghetti seems to be revealing a poetics of sport. An expanded version of this poetics can be found in Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto,” which begins by proposing that a baseball stadium is a good place to read. “Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,/ reading Ezra Pound” are the poem’s opening lines—lines that manage, in 18 syllables, to evoke a multitude of simple but satisfying activities and to suggest the richness of experience that we all have access to as readers, eaters, spectators and sunbathers. In the final stanzas of the poem, Ferlinghetti implies that baseball is more exciting than the typical Anglo-Saxon epic because of the way baseball provides a stage for men from different cultures to be heroes if they play well enough. The rules and rhythms of the game, Ferlinghetti suggests, improve on the faceless strongman heroism of the old epics. Nothing in Beowulf is as inspiring as Willie Mays rounding the bases “like a footrunner from Thebes.”

In the pre-game human interest hullaballoo surrounding Super Bowl XLVI, coming up on February 5, you will hear about Eli Manning receiving a surprise post-game visit from his brother Peyton after the NFC championship. You will hear about Victor Cruz, the gritty Giants wideout who was unheralded at the start of the season and is finishing it as a star. Probably you’ll hear about Tom Brady really wanting to win another Super Bowl as well. During all these interviews, the camera will zoom in on the players’ faces. But once the Super Bowl starts, once the masked and padded players finally take the field, the game itself will become a big moving scrum. What individuals do on the gridiron that day will be hard to parse without the assistance of slow-motion replays and expert commentary.

One thing that’s interesting about Ferlinghetti’s poem is the way the baseball players are taken individually, how they step up the plate and become heroes but at the same time poke holes in our notions about heroes needing to use force and violence in order to master other men. In the Times interview, Ferlinghetti seems disappointed in pro football partly because it hasn’t found a way to transcend the violence of the old epics. “It’s murder out there,” the aging poet said, noting that most NFL players, when they retire, are too battered to make normal progress into old age. (He would be comforted to know that former NFL running back Eddie George recently played the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and is pursuing an acting career, but this is of course a glaring exception to the rule.) Ferlinghetti seems to be telling us that football, with its fragmented violence, narrows our experience instead of expanding it, overwhelming us with brutal spectacle. You can’t read Ezra Pound at a football game. In a sense, it’s not just the players who are suffering from the sport’s violence; the design and presentation of a football game does violence to its spectators as well. It attacks our attention spans and subverts our appreciation of individual details.

Of course it can be pretty hard to avoid watching the Super Bowl, even if you think football is overblown buffoonery. But keep in mind that, on Super Bowl Sunday, there are other options. That day, on ESPN 3 (the all-too-accessible free online Wonder Channel), you can watch Italian, Spanish or Dutch soccer games, or tune into the Caribbean Baseball Series and watch Mexico take on the Dominican Republic. At least one aging icon of American poetry would surely approve.

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Before the Penn State scandal broke on Nov. 5, I thought I had these Coors Light commercials more or less figured out. They were designed to appeal to men who love watching football but feel inadequate as spectators—not tough or manly enough to be true fans. When the tiny coaches lean against towering beer bottles and scream their exhortations, the watcher is reminded of the violence and intimidation inherent in the game, but is at the same time reassured. After all, there is Herm Edwards, who always had a kind of threatening glare, but he’s so diminutive that you could flick him away with a single hand. (Although there’s no need to flick Edwards away in this case, because he’s asking you to do something you’re already kind of good at: swilling beers. Put me in, Coach!)

Awful and tragic and overwhelming as the Penn State story is, I feel it’s somehow connected to our culture’s cramped archive of football-themed beer ads. But now, as details continue to trickle out of central Pennsylvania like toxic sludge dribbling out of a coalmine, I can see I missed the mark in my initial theory about Herm Edwards and the super-short coaches of Super Cold (other commercials feature Mike Ditka and Jim Mora). So I’m still wondering: what does the act of belittling football coaches suggest about our vision of sports and manhood in America?

This NPR wrap-up of the Penn State football scandal is one of the clearest, most concise I’ve seen, so I’ll offer the link and sum up in the briefest manner possible: Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State player and defensive coordinator, was charged with sexually abusing eight boys over the course of a decade and a half. Many of the instances of abuse allegedly took place in the showers of the Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus. Several different people witnessed Sandusky showering with boys, and news of Sandusky’s behavior spread to the iconic head coach of the Penn State football team, Joe Paterno, and to the university’s president, Graham Spanier (who, believe it or not, has a background in family counseling and sociology). Information was shared, inquiries were conducted, but none of these supposedly exemplary leaders did the right thing. Now Spanier and Paterno, a craggy, paternal, benevolent-seeming football coach if there ever was one, have been fired, and many Penn State students, fans and alumni are outraged that “Joe Pa” hasn’t been allowed to go out on his own terms. How was Paterno supposed to know what exactly was going on and what to do about it? He’s just a football coach.

Except in this country we don’t see football coaches as “just football coaches.” We tend to ascribe to them—coaches in general, maybe, but football coaches in particular—certain wisdom about the hearts of men. A good football coach, we like to think, has character and knows how to judge character. He motivates by believing in and appealing to the character of the men he includes on his team. This brand of motivation goes beyond football, we tell ourselves. This is the reason so many of us (myself included) loved watching the television adaptation of H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: because the show revolved around a humble high school football coach who taught lessons about the ethical dimensions of living. “You are a molder of men,” the coach’s wife tells him in one episode. In another episode, a full season later, one of the coach’s protégés tells him the same thing: “You are a molder of men.” We can almost believe the phrase when the wife says it, because she loves her husband, because he’s such a great guy. But when we hear the phrase again, in the mouth of another character—Coach, you’re a molder of men—we realize it’s ridiculous. And we realize we are ridiculous for so badly wanting this to be true: coaches mold men. The book Friday Night Lights never makes such assertions; instead, the author suggests that football glory is as likely to ruin a young man’s character as to teach him about responsibility. But in the TV show, in episode after episode, Coach Taylor teaches his players how football can illuminate a man’s soul. 

Of course Paterno should have been fired: his stature as a football coach had no bearing on his common sense; he showed a horrendous failure of leadership off the field. And this brings us back to the tiny coaches in those insipid ads. Why would we want to see these authority figures as innocuous little toy men? Because we understand that we care too much about what football coaches do. These guys have our spiritual wellbeing in their hands, and we feel guilty for making them so important, making the sport our religion. In the commercials we poke fun at them, shrink them down, pretend like they’re only good for shilling cold beer. Look at the little coach! But when the game comes back on after the commercial break, when we see the coaches prowling the sidelines with those authoritative headsets covering their ears, we half-believe they can hear our prayers.

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It may or may not be true that the majority pro baseball players are Neanderthals, but so far this season, several prominent Major League players have agreed to participate in Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project. The idea behind Savage’s campaign is that young people who are gay may need to hear testimonials from gay adults and sympathetic celebrities about surviving their isolated, difficult, full-of-doubt teen years. LGBT kids need to feel that the future is full of choices; they need to see that adults and young people who once felt uncertainty and shame about who they are now feel pride and a sense of freedom.

The first Major League team to film an It Gets Better video in support of LGBT youth was the San Francisco Giants; the most recent squad to join the campaign is the Boston Red Sox. One thing about the videos that fascinates: these stiff-upper-lip baseball men really don’t know how to talk to the camera when they’re asked about something other than their batting average. At one point, Boston infielder Kevin Youkilis says, “A lot of people go and get therapy—myself included,” which is more amazing than anything anyone else says about sexual orientation in the Red Sox video. While I’m not a Red Sox fan, I felt unaccountably proud of Kevin Youkilis for trying to open up in his It Gets Better appearance. I knew Youk—the grandson of Romanian Jewish immigrants—was one of the few active Jewish Major Leaguers. But talking about his own therapy experience in a public service video about sexual orientation? Youkilis is way more Woody Allen than I expected.

There’s one especially poignant photo of the emotional tumult that took place when Derek Jeter crossed the plate after hitting a home run for his 3,000^th Major League hit. In this picture by the photographer Robert Sabo, Jeter’s back is to the camera—we see the famous No. 2 on his pin-striped jersey, and a smudge of dirt on his pin-striped pants, a sign that he’s still full of hustle after all these years. His teammates are flooding from the dugout to give him a milestone mazel tov. There’s A-Rod on the right edge of the frame, smirking under his dark glasses, hands held high as if he’s the one who did something great. But the face in the center this portrait of collective joy is the face of the Yankees’ battered and embattled catcher, Jorge Posada.

Both of Posada’s arms are wrapped around his friend, clutching, signaling something purely generous and unjealous in the embrace. There is a wide smile spread over Posada’s face, which is tucked up next to Jeter’s helmet. It’s a picture of love (which gives this line from the New York Post an unintended resonance: “Posada and Jeter: four rings together”).

When I first saw it in the sports pages, the photo moved me. It also made me think through the semiotics of fist-bumping and rump-slapping and helmet-knocking, the homoerotic and homophobic physical gestures that male athletes display in different sports. When is it okay in baseball for men to embrace? Pat a teammate on the ass? When is it appropriate to keep things to a low-key congratulatory fist-bump? (My wife and I sometimes employ the fist-bump when we’ve gotten the baby to bed, or cleaned up the apartment after having friends over for dinner; the light tapping together of knuckles has a satisfying connotation of We did something good while openly acknowledging that the victory may be short-lived.)

When asked about the embrace at home plate, Posada told reporters that his first words to Jeter were, “I’m proud of you.”

It’s a sweet sentiment between teammates and old friends. But the Yankees can make the season more memorable—and more full of pride—by signing on to the It Gets Better project and making one of those painfully low-rent videos. Production values aren’t important in this case. It’s the players showing their faces, wearing their team colors and speaking up that matters.

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You started walking about a month ago. At first, you could only make it five or six steps before losing your footing—before dropping, a bit violently, into a sitting position on the floor. This surprising turn of events never seemed to upset you, although it scared the hell out of me a few times. (I wonder if this is why grown-ups like theme park rides: a rollercoaster may help us remember the long-ago rush of learning how to walk.) Anyway, your balance has improved slowly, day by day, and now you can go a dozen steps or more in a row. You’re getting quicker. You march back and forth in our Brooklyn apartment, seeing very little of interest aside from your haggard and astonished parents. You seem delighted by your own motion.

I’m supposed to be writing a sports column right now. But your headlong bipedalism is as amazing to me as anything I’ve seen from a pro athlete in the last few weeks. So in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals, both of which were decided very much to my liking, I am writing down a brief record—something we can look back on later—mixing together your most audacious acts of toddler athleticism with recent pro sports highlights.

This morning, you picked up an empty baby shampoo bottle as you went walking around the apartment—this bottle is one of your favorite toys right now for some reason—and you held it like a roaming quarterback holds a football when he breaks out of the pocket, looking downfield for an open receiver. Except you put the shampoo bottle in your mouth, you kept tasting it. You kneeled down to pick up a white ribbon with your other hand—kneeling without falling, that’s new—and you shook the limp ribbon as though you expected it to make some kind of sound.

The basketball player Dirk Nowitzki, a very tall German man, just helped the Dallas Mavericks win the NBA championship. Nowitzki’s key highlights were his driving end-of-game lay-ups—he elevated above his defenders and managed to score even though the people trying to stop him were notorious bad-asses. (You will learn as you go through life that it can be great fun to root against notorious bad-asses.)

At breakfast you were holding a couple of the silvery measuring spoons that you like to carry around. You put half a blueberry in the teaspoon, then squeezed another half-blueberry next to the first one. You’re beginning to understand what a spoon is for: we use them at the table when we eat. But you don’t fully comprehend the mechanics of spoons yet. Soon you picked the blueberry pieces out of the teaspoon and jammed both berry-halves into your mouth with your fingers. As you chewed, you stuck your hand in your mother’s water glass.

This guy in Major League Soccer scored an unbelievable circus-stunt goal the other day. He didn’t even really look at the goal as he shot the ball. As your father, I feel guilty that I waste time watching soccer highlights, but I watch them anyway. I care about our national soccer culture. This concern has been a horrendous waste of time and a great source of pleasure throughout my adult life.

When you walk, you keep your feet spread way apart, a very wide stance. Once you figure out a narrower stance you’re going to be sprinting around, here one moment, gone the next.

The Boston Bruins just won the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 39 years. The star of the championship series was the Bruins’ goalie Tim Thomas, who was astounding at every turn. Thomas sank into that extrasensory groove that hockey goalies are sometimes blessed with, as though the hockey puck, from their perspective, is as big and slow as a chocolate cake.

You’ve been bossing around the big red ball. Your mother has an inflatable exercise ball that is about as tall as you are; Mom uses the ball to stretch out, strengthen her back and help her balance—she lies across the ball in our big room like a shipwreck victim floating on a scrap of wood. But you, you shove this ball around, give the gigantic faceless globe your sternest looks, push it with your hand so that it rolls away from you, then chase after it and push it some more. Because our apartment’s floors slope unpredictably in some places (and because you can’t push very hard yet), the ball often pauses in mid-roll and then starts moving back in your direction. The first few times this happened, you were terrified. Now you stand your ground—a little scared still, I think, but determined. You hold your hand up as the red ball bears down. You push back.

Crawling is so stable, four on the floor, perfectly functional—some speedy version of crawling works for gorillas, why not for us? The more I see you totter around, on the edge of crashing every third step, the more I appreciate the messed-up miracle of momentum that we learn to take for granted.

Now you’re asleep. Almost all the picture books we read to you end with sleeping; the protagonist, puppy or wombat or whatever, winds up closing his or her eyes and snoring on the last page. I wonder if these images of sleep make an impression on you. My guess is you’re on your feet even in your dreams.

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In the Book of Job, a capricious, punishing God speaks from behind the obscuring protection of a whirlwind. God’s formerly pious subject, Job, is suddenly questioning Him and bitching about all kinds of things: he’s taken aback by a series of unexpected health problems, feels enraged and cheated by the death of his livestock and won’t shut up about the calamitous ends of his sons and daughters. When Job complains, God kicks up a twister and projects His voice from the eye of the storm:

Who is this whose ignorant words
Smear my design with darkness?
Stand up now like a man;
I will question you: please, instruct me.*

I couldn’t help thinking of the Book of Job when I read Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article “Madoff’s Curveball.” The article, a profile of New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, is Toobin’s best ever for the magazine. But if you’re a Mets fan, the article is also Toobin’s worst, because it prefigures the team’s utter doom.

Toobin went behind the scenes of one of Major League Baseball’s most troubled franchises and, with the zeal of an inspired investigative reporter, pieced together a portrait of a powerful man cratering under the pressure of financial ruin. Toobin, who doesn’t normally write about sports (his usual subject is the legal profession), has made the clannish cadre of New York sportswriters around him envious of his big scoop: he got the Mets’ owner to talk trash on the record about his own team. While eating cheeseburgers in the owner’s box with Toobin during a Mets-Astros game, Wilpon began to make taunting remarks about Mets stars Carlons Beltran, Jose Reyes and David Wright. The team as a whole, Wilpon declared, is “snakebitten” and “shitty.” All of his comments were published in Toobin’s article.

Wilpon seems to be engaged in his own re-telling of the story of Job, but he’s confused about which role he is meant to play. Sometimes he imagines himself as a helpless mortal whose happiness and good fortune have been erased by the powers that be (or, in this case, by a combination of overrated sluggers and Bernie Madoff). In other moments, Wilpon casts himself as a betrayed and angry god. I guess if you own a sports franchise this kind of self-deification is an occupational hazard, but as a Mets fan I find Wilpon’s outburst inexcusable. The injury-riddled Mets had fought their way back to a .500 record before Wilpon’s comments were published; since then, thanks in part to a serious morale problem created by the guy who signs their paychecks, the Mets have been in a tailspin.

Toobin’s reporting has touched off more controversy than any New York City baseball story since Roger Clemens threw the shard of a broken bat in the general direction of Mike Piazza in the 2000 World Series. Now Wilpon and the 42-year-old hedge fund manager who has decided to buy into the Mets franchise are in the New York sports pages every day. Despite all this coverage, though, I am not satisfied. Stand up like a man, now, Mr. Wilpon: please, instruct me. When your players are fighting game after game for their dignity, for the good of the team, what do you hope to accomplish by taking a bat to their balls?

***

*From Stephen Mitchell’s 1987 translation.

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During Ramirez’s career, cataloguing and critiquing “Manny Being Manny” moments became a pastime within America’s Pastime. In Cleveland, when he was playing for the Indians, Manny once left his paycheck (which was worth a lot—a lot—of money) in an empty boot in the visitors’ locker room. As a member of the Red Sox team that won two World Series championships in 2004 and 2007, Manny began to re-conceptualize the Green Monster at Fenway as his personal man-cave, retreating to the backstage area of left field to sip a sports drink or talk on his cell phone or, most memorable of all, so he could pee (in the middle of an inning) behind the ballpark’s hallowed scoreboard. As a Los Angeles Dodger, Manny argued with manager Joe Torre about whether the slugger’s famous dreadlocked tresses would or would not be trimmed back. And it’s all led to this: faced with a 100-day suspension for using a performance-enhancing drug, Manny Ramirez has decided to quit the game for good.

Without Manny, we now have to rely on a handful of ball-playing crazies who seem to me mere shadows of Ramirez. Who are the clowns now? The San Francisco Giants’ closer Brian Wilson is at least interesting and genuinely eccentric. Like Manny, Wilson has crafted some sublime moments of theater during his career, including the time when he arranged for a mostly nude dude to walk across the room during an at-home interview. But the best bits of Wilson’s fooling take place off the field—the insane antics he performs during games are mostly predictable, game-related, the products of emotion and fierce competitiveness. You couldn’t really say the same about Manny Ramirez’s game-time behavior—odd, yes, but predictable, no. And Manny’s off-season weirdness was sublime in its own way as well. The best example of that, I think, was his attempt to sell (or help his neighbor sell) a grill on eBay in 2007. The listing included pictures of Manny standing next to the grill, along with a message that began, “Hi, I’m Manny Ramirez. I bought this AMAZING grill for about $4,000 and used it once…”

It’s funny to think of “performance-enhancing drugs” in the context of performance art. Did Marina Abramovic, performance artist extraordinaire, need banned substances to make it through her grueling performances at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year? Abramovic sat for hours on end in the museum’s atrium, day after day, inviting visitors to sit across from her and look into her face. No one was supposed to say anything. Some visitors sat with Abramovic for a couple minutes, some for much longer. For Abramovic, who according to the MoMA website “began using her own body as the subject, object and medium of her work in the early 1970s,” it was just Marina being Marina. And I believe that if Manny had made it to MoMA for that particular exhibition, if he’d sat across from the lauded artist and looked into her eyes, he might have recognized himself.

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I was against the Carmelo Anthony trade before it happened. This year, the Knicks already had a pretty good basketball team (for once) without Melo; more than that, New York had an interesting cast of characters. Amar’e Stoudemire was the star of the show, but there were several appealing role players on the team as well: Raymond Felton was having his best season as a pro at point guard; the Italian forward Danilo Gallinari was developing nicely and starting to add more aggressive drives to his regimen of long-range jump shots; Wilson Chandler balanced toughness with a deft touch in the lane. These were good basketball players! Really, how could one player, star or no star, be worth as much to the Knicks as these three talented professionals, plus a very large Russian with a perfect Frankenstein monster utterance (Mozgov) for a name?

I am coming around to the wisdom of exchanging three-fifths of the team’s starting rotation for a shining star, though. (It should be noted that the Knicks also acquired a few other players in the trade, including the veteran point guard Chauncey Billups, who, though a little on the old side, is no joke.)
 I feel for the players who had to uproot their lives in the middle of the season, move halfway across the country and transfer their loyalty to a new team, a new city. It was good having Felton and Gallinari on the Knicks’ list of dramatis personae for a while. But I also want the Knicks to win.

The Carmelo Anthony Experiment has been going fairly well. As of this writing, the Knicks are 5-3 since Anthony joined the team. The most crucial thing that Melo and the aging Chauncey Billups (who has already missed several games due to injury) give the Knicks is an increased capability to make big shots in the waning moments of games. In this sense, at least, the Melo trade looks smarter than the Miami Heat’s recent construction of their instant Evil Empire. Once the organization lured LeBron James and Chris Bosh to South Florida, the Heat seemed invincible—on paper. But James has recently missed a string of big shots at the buzzer, and partly because of his ineptitude-under-pressure, the Heat lost four straight.

Does that mean the Knicks have any realistic chance of beating the Heat in the NBA playoffs? Hard to say. But it’s interesting to watch teams like New York and Miami as they try to assemble superhuman teams by crudely stitching together the abilities and egos of major stars. There’s something very Mary Shelley about it; watching these stars try to work together raises questions about individual splendor and the limits of Romanticism on the basketball court. Normally at this time of year I’m much more interested in college basketball, but now that college teams are suspending their star players for having consensual sex, I feel like some sort of protest is in order. Maybe I’ll boycott March Madness this spring and turn my attention to the pros instead. After all, the early-round possibilities of the NBA playoffs are truly compelling this year. For once, we can look at the likely Eastern Conference postseason bracket and say, It’s Alive.

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So enough about Pittsburgh. Let’s turn our attention to the other team playing in the big game on Feb. 6 in Dallas.

Who are the Green Bay Packers?

First of all, the Packers are the only team in the NFL owned by a hundred thousand fans instead of a single fat cat billionaire or a small corps of fat cat multimillionaires.

The team’s quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, reportedly likes turkey and avocado sandwiches, according to a woman who works at the deli favored by Packers players and their wives.

The team’s name comes from the Indian Packing Company, a business that briefly financed the nascent Packers in 1919.

Green Bay’s current coach, Mike McCarthy, grew up in Pittsburgh and loved the Steelers as a boy.

One of Green Bay’s wide receivers has the same name as the guy who wrote From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.

Speaking of From Here to Eternity, did you happen to notice the revelations in 2009 about James Jones (the novelist, not the Super Bowl-bound wide receiver) being forced to expunge references to gay sex from his most famous book? This article explains it all. The brief passage quoted from the book is terrific, partly because it practically forces the reader to imagine Frank Sinatra participating in a dialogue about blowjobs (Sinatra played the character Private Angelo Maggio in the movie adaptation). James Jones’s daughter Kaylie, also a writer, recently composed her own take on the editorial exchanges her father had about the “salacious” (imagine Frank Sinatra saying that word) content in From Here to Eternity. All in all, this makes me want to actually read a James Jones book for once instead of just watching the film adaptations (Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is especially good), and it makes me want James Jones the wide receiver to have a huge game on Feb. 6 for Green Bay… 150 yards, say, and two TDs, including a balletic toe-dance in the corner of the end zone for the winning score.

Apparently, in the early 1950s, James Jones the novelist fought for the gay references in his ideal version of From Here to Eternity. But eventually, after being told that the Postal Service might not deliver his books to stores, the writer agreed to extensive cuts. Anxieties about fictional depictions of gay sex aside, this is funny today because relying on the Postal Service to deliver texts of any kind is an increasingly quaint notion. In 2011, at long last, readers can get their hands on salacious stories instantly, via electronic devices that save them the potential embarrassment of walking trashy titles up to the register. (Apparently this newfound book-buying anonymity has meant big bucks for the romance genre.) Plus, when you’re reading a digital romance novel, no one else has to see the cover. In this way, at least, e-books may be enhancing our freedom.

The story of James Jones’s battle for the integrity of From Here to Eternity is newly relevant in the months following the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Some of his remarks to his editor more than half a century ago anticipate one side of the DADT debate: “[T]he things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or 10 years, come in someone else’s book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn’t do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve … ” In the end, Jones insisted on keeping some of the so-called “homosexual scenes” because they reflected the reality he’d witnessed as a member of the Armed Services during World War Two.

Times change. But there’s one ad I doubt we’ll see during this year’s blockbuster Super Bowl broadcast: an Army recruitment spot encouraging gay Americans to serve in the military.

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Full disclosure: I live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and have lived in the neighborhood for five years. I know the neighborhood’s streets. I have ordered carryout from its taquerias and dined in its dim sum emporiums, pointing wordlessly at shrimp rolls, buns, and dumplings. I have walked by innumerable sad-sack gatherings outside the now-shuttered OTB on Fifth Avenue. I am a part of the neighborhood and not a part of it, a resident and an observer—maybe even a student of the place. Perhaps this means that I should stop myself from reviewing Sunset Park, the latest novel by Paul Auster.

And yet here I am, sitting in my apartment, beginning a review of this renowned novelist’s attempt to tell a story set partly in my neighborhood (or a fictional place named after my neighborhood). In other words, I am behaving like a Paul Auster character, imagining a dialogue with a famous literary recluse who lives not far down the road, wondering about the ways fiction and reality overlap.

Before actually reading Sunset Park, I felt irritated that another writer—a great (or sometimes great) writer—had decamped from his comfy digs in affluent Park Slope and traveled to my downscale neighborhood to colonize the place with his characters and imagined scenarios. All sorts of questions bubbled up in my critical echo chamber before I read the first page: Does Auster really know anything about my neighborhood? Does he have any responsibility as a novelist to capture Sunset Park as I know it? And more complicated:  Is my own “knowledge” of the place credible, or merely a fiction of my own design?

I quickly forgot these questions, because the first 68 pages of Sunset Park are masterful. The novel’s opening features a typical Auster character—a bookish, introspective young man from New York City—who has transported himself outside the realm of familiarity, comfort, and home. The character, Miles Heller, is living in southern Florida, cleaning out abandoned houses during the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Miles is literate and smart, a thinker, yet he dropped out of college and has no professional or artistic ambitions. He hasn’t seen or spoken to his parents for several years; instead, he has traveled around the country working odd jobs, keeping in touch with only a single person from his past.

Paul Auster

In Florida, Miles has fallen in love with a precocious Cuban American high school student (she is not quite 18) named Pilar. Pilar accepts Miles’s tenuous relationship to his past. She makes love to him tirelessly but has rules about what Miles is allowed to do with her “mommy hole.” The age difference between the two is a serious problem—and both are aware of this—but they want to be together.

At the end of this lovely, troubling first section of the book, Miles heads back to New York for the first time in years. Auster reveals the character’s thoughts as Miles travels back into territory he has avoided for so long:

Just north of Washington, as the bus enters the final leg of the trip, snow begins to fall. They are moving into winter now, he realizes, the cold days and long nights of his boyhood winters, and suddenly the past has turned into the future. He closes his eyes, thinking about Pilar’s face, running his hands over her absent body, and then, in the darkness behind his lids, he sees himself as a black speck in a world made of snow.

This is a deft maneuver on Auster’s part—a compact paragraph that ties together all that’s come before while simultaneously pushing us toward a series of confrontations that will change the main character’s life. What will become of Pilar? Will Miles see his parents again? What is the relationship between past and future Auster is trying to work out here? And what about the tension between what the book calls “Anglo” and “Latino” cultures—what does the novel have in store on that front?

This is when the novel touches down in Sunset Park. Miles temporarily moves into a house in the neighborhood where a handful of underemployed, artsy people have set up residence. They are squatters, paying no rent; the house has been abandoned, echoing the theme of abandoned homes that recurs throughout the story. The leader of this rent-free gang is Bing Nathan, the only childhood friend Miles has kept in touch with during his years of exile. Now the perspective of the novel begins to shift from one member of this ragtag band to the next; unfortunately, not all of these perspectives are as compelling as Miles Heller’s.

What really irked me, though, was Auster’s gloss on Sunset Park. Here is how the venerable Brooklyn author introduces (or dismisses) the neighborhood:

That Sunday, the two of them went out to explore the territory between Fifteenth and Sixty-fifth streets in western Brooklyn, an extensive hodgepodge of an area that runs from Upper New York Bay to Ninth Avenue, home to more than a hundred thousand people, including Mexicans, Dominicans, Poles, Chinese, Jordanians, Vietnamese, American whites, American blacks, and a settlement of Christians from Gujarat, India. Warehouses, factories, abandoned waterfront facilities, a view of the Statue of Liberty, the shut-down Army Terminal where ten thousand people once worked, a basilica named Our Lady of Perpetual Help…

This dry listing of neighborhood facts (which continues for another half-page) fails to bring the setting to life. And even if Auster is reinventing the place for his own fictional ends, it should come to life for a reader—but this passage sounds like a clumsy paragraph from a real-estate broker’s website. Later, as Miles walks through Sunset Park, Auster writes, “There is something dead about the place… the mournful emptiness of poverty and immigrant struggle, an area without banks or bookstores, only check-cashing operations and a decrepit public library,” and while this condemnation is from a character’s point of view, it still feels reductive, controlled by the author’s judgment. In other words, it sounds like Auster, not Miles. In Florida, Miles seemed sensitive to and curious about tales of “immigrant struggle”—he was in love with Pilar, learning about her Cuban American family, helping her fill out college applications. But now, in Auster’s Brooklyn, immigrants are faceless, the neighborhood is bleak, and Miles is suddenly blind to the lives and hopes of the people around him.

There is a lot to like about Sunset Park. The novel is peopled with book lovers—publishers, writers, autodidacts who read voraciously, people who fight for the rights of international authors at the PEN American Center. Auster has created a world where love of literature is a religion, where the pursuit of bookishness is holy. It is one of his talents to make us believe in and care about this world of books and bookishness, to see its beauty and fragility. In times like ours, it’s hard to knock Auster’s project. But the opening of Sunset Park promises a new Austerian ambition: an interest in juxtaposing the world of New York literati with a larger, more complicated America. The cloistered story that Sunset Park ultimately becomes is charming and suggestive, filled with lyricism. But as satisfying as the novel can be, it turns away from the world Auster is uncertain about, settling instead for the New York neighborhoods—real, imagined, literal, figurative—that he has shown us many times before.

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On a Tuesday evening during the Knicks’ winning streak, I walked into a wine store on Eighth Street and tried to use my debit card to buy a cheap bottle of red. “Card declined,” the clerk told me, handing me a little slip he’d torn from the credit card machine. The scrap of paper backed up his assertion in greasy print: DECLINED. He looked at me impatiently, hoping I’d switch to cash. I handed him my card again, sure that it would work on this second attempt. Again, declined. “There’s no money in this account,” the clerk said to me, and when I heard those words I felt an urge to call my wife, who didn’t pick up her phone, no doubt because she was baby-wrangling, trying to give our wriggling, squirmy infant daughter a bath. I left my wife a message asking her to check our account online when she had a chance. I had no idea what I’d find when I got home.

The other unimaginable thing that happened in New York sports during this time was the Sal Alosi Episode. Alosi, the (now suspended) strength coach for the New York Jets, stuck his knee out and intentionally tripped a Miami Dolphins special teams player named Nolan Carroll as Carroll was sprinting down the sideline, covering a kick return. Coach trips player! Man bites dog! The New York City tabloids covered the incident, of course, and the video of Alosi’s blindside cheap shot traveled all over the web. Almost as strange as the trip itself, the Dolphins actually won the game. This, too, signaled some kind of bizarre rupture in the fabric of the space-time continuum.

When I walked into our Brooklyn apartment after my failed attempt to purchase wine with my debit card, I discovered my wife, pale with worry, staring at the screen of our laptop. “Someone’s stealing our money!” she whispered, frantic but quiet. She didn’t want to wake the baby. My wife was on hold, the phone cradled to her ear, trying to get through to the bank. In the past three hours, a faceless stranger in Philadelphia had spent $3,500 of our money at a shopping mall 95 miles away from where we sat. We could see it all there on the screen, fraudulent charges stacked in neat rows revealing the time, amount and location of every transaction. The anonymous thief even spent $6.50 at the food court, taking his (or her?) sweet time, grabbing a bite to eat—on my tab. Why not? He (or she) must have gotten hungry, spending other people’s money like that. In my mind, I pictured the thief as a slovenly man seated at a counter in a generic food court, bending over a cafeteria tray, shopping bags scattered around his thick, ungainly ankles. But then I realized that you can’t get much food for $6.50, so I pictured someone skinny, parsimonious, a driven, efficient identity robber picking at a stolen salad.

A week later, after a series of agonizing phone calls and an in-person visit to my bank branch (my wife had to be there, too, because we have a joint account, and it took so long to open up a new account that the bottle I’d brought along ran out and my wife had to breastfeed our baby right there at the bank, but that’s another story), I eventually wound up in an interview room in the 72^nd police precinct in Brooklyn. While I sat there alone in the police station, filling out paperwork, I heard a pair of detectives bantering in the hall:

“Nah, fuck it, if you don’t want to give to the toy drive, it’s fine. Just some kid without a present on Christmas day. Not a problem.”

“Go fuck yourself, okay? I didn’t know about the toy drive.”

“I totally understand! The signs have only been up by the front desk for the last month and a half. Fuck it, whatever, it’s only Christmas.”

“I’m going to bring a toy.”

“Don’t tell me—I don’t care.”

“I’m going to bring a fucking toy! What should I bring?”

“Forget about it. I guess if you really want to, though, you can just imagine being a kid on Christmas morning with nothing. What would you want?”

“Thanks. Thank you for the thought experiment. I will bring a fucking toy.”

For a decade now, I’ve lived in New York City. For most of that time I’ve been fairly certain that the New Jersey Nets would move to their new digs near my first apartment in Brooklyn before the Knicks made the play-offs again. But now—now anything seems possible. The Knicks are a real basketball team again, even if the Celtics and the Heat broke their winning streak.  Strangers can reach out and steal money I’ve saved for my kid. Coaches can knock down players in the middle of a game. These violations should not be possible, yet when examined closely, the rules, boundaries and virtual shields that protect us from such breaches seem flimsy indeed. The most consoling words my wife and I heard that week were variations of, “You’re not alone—this is happening to more and more people.” Now my information is out there—my Social Security number, old passwords, even my mother’s maiden name.

Did you see the collapse of the Metrodome in Mineapolis? Unmanned cameras caught the whole thing: a pillowy ceiling, like the arcing inflatable inside of a zeppelin, starts to quiver like a gelatin sculpture, straining under an unseen burden. The first narrow rift opens in the expanse of gray fabric, unleashing a line of water and snow that splashes down on the green turf far below. Then, a moment or two later, the manmade sky above the empty stadium seats really starts to fall—a feathery ton of white snow pours in serene profusion from the torn dome and makes a 20-yard-long blotch of cold muck on the field. That’s it. No ball, no players, no fans, no game. Just winter breaking through the roof.

I don’t know who stole my identity. It might have been Russian or Ukrainian or Nigerian cyber-crooks, it might have been the server at a restaurant with a pocket skimmer who ripped my credit card information. Nothing personal. Just business. But lately, just in time for the holidays, I’ve been thinking about the malignant spirit that is out there in the world, or at least in Philadelphia, in a food court, where someone brought to his or her lying lips $6.50 worth of food-court nibbles on a chilly evening in early December.

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