Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

There came a point in Sleepless Nights when I began to think of a bit of dialogue from Anne Tyler's Searching for Caleb:

You want to hear about my movie?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to buy a camera and walk around filming to one side of things, wherever the action isn't. Say there's a touchdown at a football game, I'll narrow in on one straggling player at the other end of the field. If I see a purse-snatcher I'll find someone reading a newspaper just to the right of the victim."

"What's the point?" Justine asked.

"Point? It'll be the first realistic movie ever made. In true life you're never focused on where the action is. Or not so often. Not so finely." He stopped and looked at her. "Point?" he said. "You don't usually ask me that."

This isn't exactly what Elizabeth Hardwick does in Sleepless Nights, but it is close enough to give me pause. Much of this novel--"this work of transformed and even distorted memory," as the narrator calls it in the opening lines--is concerned, to a great extent, with characters who would have been more on the periphery of her life than at the center, the "unfortunate ones" she has known, who live "surrounded by their own kind."

Perhaps here began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.

The narrator, a woman named Elizabeth like the author, who has lived a life similar to that of the author, has landed as "a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home." She chooses to remember people and places from her past, from the Lexington, Kentucky, of her youth, to the cities of her adulthood, Boston, Amsterdam, New York, and put her memories into a type of order. But she omits most of what would provide the reader with a solid ground for understanding how and why she's come to this and what has happened to those who would have been at the center of her life, other than that they have died:

Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory.

Readers learn the distilled life stories of a maid, a laundress, an Appalachian communist. We catch glimpses of an uncle who writes letters to Elizabeth's mother from a mental hospital and various roommates, constructing lives out of Arthur Murray dancing classes or phonied-up prior job experience. We learn of Elizabeth's gay friend J., who dies young, the offstage Billie Holliday, a carpet sweeper and the residents of the squalid Hotel Schuyler, instead of the relationship that caused her to need an abortion, dealt with in two brief paragraphs that focus on the abortioners and their wives. Misdirection.

Elizabeth has lots of sex, not all of it enjoyable, but does not allow herself to become a victim of "fateful fertility" as her mother did, although she says she has always, "all of my life, been looking for help from a man." She and her childhood girlfriends learned "the tangled nature of bribery" via a predator who paid their way into movie theaters and fondled them as they ate chocolates.

To think, that is to wonder what I would be forgiven for remembering or imagining. What do those of my flesh and blood deem suitable, not a betrayal? Why didn't you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when all of it is not. I do not know the answer.

Narrator or author speaking here?

All we know for sure is is that Elizabeth, who "loves to be known by those" she cares for, writes down her memories of those she dares "not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night."

I'm definitely looking forward to discussion of this one at Slaves of Golconda and in the Metaxu Cafe forums and to reading more Elizabeth Hardwick. Thanks to Imani for suggesting this one!

Slipstreaming away

I am looking forward to reading my new slipstream anthology Feeling Very Strange, although I might save it for the R.I.P. challenge this fall. I have dipped into its intro, however, and glanced at a blog discussion excerpted between the stories--attempts to describe what slipstream is, or rather was back in 1989 when Bruce Sterling first categorized it as "a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." In 2005 David Moles said that slipstream had come to mean stories "that feel a bit like magical realism. . .[that] make the familiar strange--by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal/fantastical intrustions." Or, as the question is later put, "Is slipstream ultimately about being Margaret Atwood?"

There are no Margaret Atwood stories in the collection, but included are ones by Michael Chabon, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Jonathan Lethem and Karen Joy Fowler. Fowler's Nebula-winning "What I Didn't See" isn't included, but is mentioned in the intro in a discussion of the relationship of slipsteam to genre fiction:

So, for instance, the publication of Karen Joy Fowler's "What I Didn't See" by SciFiction, one of the major outlets for science fiction in the oughts, sparked a considerable debate among writers and fans of "slipstream" and those writers and readers of science fiction for whom Fowler's story had no legitimate place in the genre. The fact that "What I Didn't See" won the Nebula Award, one of science fiction's highest prizes, only adds to the irony.

I read "What I Didn't See" this afternoon and have to say I also don't get why this story would be regarded as science fiction. I liked it; I'm even glad it won an award, but I would no more call it science fiction than I would Andrea Barrett's science-infused short stories.

Anyone familiar with the story and willing to take a crack at making my stodgy old brain understand?

Ghost writing

When we talk about ghosts, we are speaking in layers of metaphor. We are not usually speaking about wispy bodies in rotting shrouds, but about family secrets, buried impulses, unsolved mysteries, anything that lingers and clings. We are speaking of the sense of loss that sometimes overtakes us, a nostalgia for something that we can't name. There is a way in which the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" is unnecessary to ask: we all know a few, and they walk at all hours, if only through our memories. Our ancestors are encoded in our genes. Look at your face in the mirror, and one day you will see one of your parents, moving under your own skin; the next day it may be a grandparent who has come to visit. Within you, there are people you have never been able to mourn because you never knew them, people from the distant past; the traces of your animal ancestors still live in your instincts, in your physiology. As products of evolution, we carry all the past inside us; we are walking repositories of the lost.

I have written a memoir called Giving Up the Ghost, which is about my own childhood, but also about my ancestors and children who were never born, and about the ghosts we all have in our lives: the ghosts of possibility, the paths we didn't take, and the choices we didn't make, and expectations, which seemed perfectly valid at the time, but which somehow or other weren't fulfilled. I describe ghosts like this: "They are the rags and tags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don't know what to do with, knowledge that you can't process; they're cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page."

--Hilary Mantel

Reactions in brief

Good news: Two Dwight covers on Raul Malo's latest cd.

Swoon.

Bad news (in fact, my husband called it a sacrilege): Dwight's "Wild Ride" being covered by Kenny Chesney.

Shudder.

A couple of fun links:

Romance covers

Literary lolcats

Ben had entered Otsego Lake Academy at the age of ten, the week after his father had died during the 1888 blizzard, with a black band around the upper part of his left arm, marking him out as a child who had had a death in the family. The black bands--there were three boys wearing them--as well as being an outward demonstration of mourning, like lowered blinds and black-edged writing-paper, might--generous-hearted souls could have chosen to believe--also have been designed to alert masters and other boys to treat their wearers with particular gentleness. The effect they actually produced was to identify easy targets for teasing, enticing little treats for the likes of Mr. Rappaport. Black bands were bull's-eyes for Brinkman, targets at which he aimed with all the sharp words of weaponry.

~~~

Oliver again, this time starting an incantation of the one Latin verb they knew how to conjugate, a proud declaration of defiance. They were like Christian martyrs going to their deaths singing hymns. With his strongly devoloped sense of irony, he would be well aware of the incongruity of their approaching the abode of The Beards chanting words that expressed all the varying ways they knew of declaring love.

~~~

He had always inagined that grammar would be austere and immutable, like the temperature at which water froze or boiled, the capital of Pennsylvania, the height of Mount Washington, or the price of thirty-nine pocket inkstands (their arithmetic books certainly believed in making the subject relevant) costing twelve cents each, but--as the weeks and months and years went by--and the lists and sentences grew down the blackboard, and in his exercise books (scrawled on the blackboard, neat and meticulous in the exercise book), Ben found, more and more, that--ignore it as he tried--emotion crept into the grammar, as he worked his way through the ink-stained textbooks with which they had by then been issued.

--Peter Rushforth, A Dead Language

A Dead Language, etc.

I've got a bad case of book bloat going on--there's way too much doublestacking in the study--and new bookcases are contingent on other household projects taking place before they can be built and installed. Dare I commit to a book-buying moratorium until the first of October? No caveats this time; coupons and gift certificates take up less space on the shelves, and between my haul at ALA last month and the review copies and orders I've received since, surely I can put off acquiring anything else until I've worked my way through a few of the ones that are already bulging out from the shelves at me.

Received yesterday:

An advanced readers copy of Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs from Stefanie (Thank you, Stefanie! We love Russo in this household.) and, from Amazon, the slipstream anthology Feeling Very Strange, which I'm pretty sure I heard about via Readerville.

On order and still to come:

Identical Strangers, a memoir from Library Thing's Early Reviewers second batch of review copies, and, from Amazon, Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext and Bernd Heinrich's The Snoring Bird, a memoir I first heard about via MFS.


I spent most of last week with Peter Rushforth's A Dead Language. As you may remember if you're a longtime reader of this blog, I was totally enamored by Rushforth's Pinkerton's Sister, which I wrote about back in 2005 (and, surprise, surprise, carried on about the lack of shelf space in the same post).

A Dead Language is a continuation of the story begun in Pinkerton's Sister. Or rather, it chronologically preceeds the earlier volume while taking up where Alice's memories ended up in the first--with the suicide of her father. ADL is really a slo-mo stream -of- consciousness exploration of emotional abuse. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, Alice Pinkerton's younger brother and Madame Butterfly's future abandoner, is a disappointment to his father, who doesn't regard him as being manly enough to deserve either decent treatment or love. Continually mocked for his physical delicateness and warned off from any of his natural inclinations or interests--books, music, choice of friends-- Ben experiences no emotional reprieve after his father's death; a week before, his father instructed the naturally-sadistic and oh-so-obliging Latin teacher at Ben's new school in how best to humiliate him.

Amo. Amas. Amat. Pater filium amat.

Years of horrific abuse suffered by Ben and the small band of misfit boys come to an end when Oliver, Ben's Oscar Wilde-influenced best friend, takes a fitting revenge against the teacher in the book's final pages.

Yet the emotional wounds are those that won't heal.

And Rushforth died before completing the third novel about the Pinkertons.

Sigh.

I'll put up a commonplace post of quotes in a day or so.

I found Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows waiting for me when I came home from work Saturday afternoon, and I stopped only to finish the last 30 pages of the Rushforth and to gloat that I hadn't paid for same-day shipping ha-ha-ha, before diving right in. Finished it Sunday afternoon.

Now I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World.