Sleepless Nights

"Sleepless Nights," (thank you, NYRB Publications, for making this book, and many others, available to the "general," Borders-shopping reader -- "Sleepless Nights," the near-forgotten dark whimsies of Walser and Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County, to mention only a very few) may be Hardwick's supreme fictional achievement -- a book almost impossible to pin down, encapsulate, domesticate & make pliant to the reading public. it's varying tone -- hardore, here-and-now realism; unsentimental remembrance; and ofen dark wit -- sets it apart from almost every American book i've read of its genre, ie. speaking loosely, the autobiographical novel (even the term "genre" must be used cautiously here, since Hardwick/"S.N." stubbornly, even willfully defies categorization): it's almost a mind-expanding collaboration of Sylvia Plath and Mark Twain. (in fact, the writer whom "Sleepless Nights" brings to my mind, strongly and forcefully, and even a bit ruefully, is Goethe.) it balances that fine line between descriptive realism and the near-hallucinatory. and while doing this, it shows, with gentle melancholy, how even the most important, even loving people in our lives can somehow simply fade away. i've read it 3 times, and it never ceases to enchant, mystify, and remind me of the unavoidable melancholy of our human lives. easily, i think, Hardwick's masterpiece. and we can't forget NYRB Publication's other gifts to the reading public, including, along with the titles i've mentioned, Glenway Westcott's "The Pilgrim Hawk" -- sadness, loneliness, ambivalence, satire, confusion, crisis, all within the short space of 120 pp. or so. another nearly and unfairly ignored classic. (i use that word even though it's come to make my skin crawl -- i mean, "Classic Coke"? and i'm NOT a snob -- i've read my Stephen King, love "Jeopardy!" & have read "Valley of the Dolls" four times -- trash MUST be given its due: it can be entertaining and fun. but thanks to NYRB Books for giving back to us "Borders shoppers" such amazing and, to some, near-forgotten, even unknown books. and, BTW, it's also a very entertaining book -- even, if you're so inclined, a fine "beach book." among its other fine qualities, it tells a very good story -- while, of course, giving us much, much more.)

Heads up, all of you with M.F.A.s and those aspiring to write narrative non-fiction and autobiography. Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights is a masterpiece of the genre avant la lettre. Through an effective use of sentence fragments, notes and letters sent and received, and sketches of people she has known intimately, Hardwick gives the reader a solid picture of New York City in the 1940s and after. But what Hardwick teaches us is that if writing can be taught, it must first be lived. Underneath Hardwick's combination of intimate conversational style and terse analysis of a lost era, one feels the author is a person of stable character, one who is a fully-conscious human being. Stylistically, Hardwick's method of composition is a pastiche of styles, a Post-modern hybrid, grounded in the fierce Modernist belief that every human being is essential to life. Hardwick conveys human individuality through the technique of synaesthesia, a breathless juxtaposition of noun and adjective; for example, a young man was "a living, sturdy weed of gossip and laughter, of racing confessions about nights of fun and errors, of cooking recipes with unexpected olives, of fish sprinkled with chocolate..." Hardwick excites our desire to know the people she has known. I am a better human being for having read this book.

This small novella from NYRB is a much-lauded work by Elizabeth Hardwick from the mid-Seventies; essentially plotless, it's a work of memory (both Proust and Tenessee Williams seem to haunt these pages... as does, oddly, Djuna Barnes) that encompasses autobiographical material from Hardwick's life growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, at Columbia as a graduate student in NYC, and in Boston as the partner of Robert Lowell (though he is never named in the narrative). The prose is often gorgeous (although there are times when it does get a bit NEW YORKER-precious in its sensory observations); the narrative passes much like a very vivid dream or a hallucination, so that though there is little to follow it will stay with you for months afterwards. This new NYRB edition comes with a spectacularly beautiful cover that suggests the hyperreal quality of the narrative, and a vacuous preface that tells you almost nothing about the book .

I can really only reiterate what the last reviewer stated. This is one of the three or four books I pull off the bookshelf constantly to reread. Hardwick is a remarkable stylist and can evoke in a few pages (if not lines!) what it would take other writers whole novels to achieve. The section on Billie Holliday is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. This is the book that made me want to write.

Part fiction, part autobiography, part a collection of lovely pensees on literature and life, this exquisite short novel moves fluidly between the narrator's Kentucky past and her New York present, with stops along the way in Europe, Maine, Boston, and elswhere. Employing a spare, pared-down prose of great beauty and oringinality, Hardwick approaches her subject--memory and the transformations we work upon it, and it upon us--with great restraint, bringing the novel's people and places vividly to life with an odd, knotty phrase or unexpected choice of word. Rather than focus with gushing self-indulgence on her own experience in the manner of contemporary tell-all memoirs, the author is more often probing the lives of the ignored and downtrodden she has known--cleaning ladies and laborers, small-town prostitutes and impoverished radicals, failed writers and homeless piano teachers. Hardwick broods over these small, burdened, often overlooked lives with a wry, unsentimental tenderness and a gentle pessimism. I can't tell you how often I've picked up this book since I first read it just to savor a paragraph or two or its gorgeously austere prose.