The Sleep-Over Artist: Fiction

Young Alex Fader has to come-of-age sometime and give up mindless video games in order to Chase Chicks...and what better way to do this than watch "The Ugly George Hour Of Truth,Sex & Violence"on NYC cableTV? My show was the Learning Curve for thousands of young boys wanting to know about those mysterious & wonderful creatures known as "goils", so Alex et al. matured from it. Maybe if Michael Jackson had seen it he wouldn't be on trial now, but Jax can soon see vidclips from it @ www.uglygeorge.com Tom Beller is taking notes again!

I found this to be a well written, captivating book. It was so captivating that I read it three times. I normally do not like, or read very much fiction . What drew me to this book was the fact that I like Thomas Beller's non-fiction writing so much. I was therefore very curious to see what his fiction would be like. I started out by reading Seduction Theory, his excellent book of short stories, several of which deal with Alex Fader, the main character of this book. To my surprise, I liked it very much. So I decided to read this book next.I was not disappointed. I found the writing to be excellent. The character of Alex Fader is well drawn, very complex and very interesting. I found the book to be ultimately very moving. Alex Fader is not always an easy character to like or understand, but his internal conflicts and great vulnerability eventually draw the reader into liking him and being concerned about his fate in life. Mr. Beller has done an excellent job with this book.

It's hard to write a review like this because there's so much to say about Thomas Beller's The Sleep-Over Artist. I am twenty years old and a creative writing major in college so I've read a lot of fiction and litereature in general. This book, is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best I have ever read. It's about relationships and the weird, crazy little world in which they exist. Betwen man and woman, father and son, mother and son and all the intimate intricicies between extended family members, with whome we share so little but also so very much. The voice of Alex Fader is so storng, charming and honest that it becomes impossible to not empathize with him. As readers, we live his life, through his eyes, his inner voice and in his skin so vividly that at times I got a lump in my throat because he articulated things so well. The images he creates. The camparissons way one thing in life can show such symbolism of something else. Something a million miles and thoughts away. His emotions, the scenes of his life, everything is brought to a higher level of conciousness; of awareness. Beller tells you what Alex is thinking as these things are going on, but not only his general reactions, he includes the millions of other tiny thoughts that accompany them. He says what his mother looks like in the kitchen that second, what he thinks she is thinking and feeling, how he feels about the fact that she could be thinking that, and he even explores the conditional future. A technique I have never seen. Alex seems to say to himself: "How will I react if she turns on the faucet right now, what exactly will I so or say?" He spans the whole globe of a single thought, not just a niear A to B process. Alex's interperatations and afterthoughts are three dimensional, complex and utterly real. This book is also funny. Belly laugh funny. I was reading it once on a three hour bus ride,it was total silence, not a word was being said , and there I was laughing so hard I was crying! Everyone thought I was crazy. I had to put it away actually. As a writer, I value this work emmensly. I will study it for years to come, it is just that brilliant. As a reader and a human being, I am so very lucky to have read it. And to have known Alex Fader inside and out, his life, the inner workings of his heart and head. Oddly, through understanding Alex, I know myself so much better too.

These stylish and modern short stories very nearly form a novel. Each concerns the experiences and observations of bereft narrator/subject Alex Fader, a thoughtful, materially privileged but heartbroken (New York) city boy, only child of intellectuals, and then Alex as a young man. In fact, Alex is rather innocently appealing - until, in a story which totally undermined my faith in him, he molests his elderly aunt's housekeeper.In precise, smart, but disassociative prose, Beller's deadpan narrator leads the reader on a sad boy's tour of 1970's Manhattan for the moderately privileged - and then London. Prep school, Manhattan upper-class landmarks (apartment buildings, neighborhoods, clubs, bakeries, and more) and diversions figure heavily in the stories. The boy's psychoanalyst father, benign, "handsome," but barely-known by his son, has died of cancer - quickly. Alex embarks on a series of quiet adventures in order to grieve for that painfully absent father. There is no solace. His mother, a subtle and appealing stranger, dotes on him, and he loves her. There are several puzzling small details which a fact-checker might have spotted: a misunderstanding of the symptoms of Alzheimer's, a convenient but utterly undeveloped (and therefore, not believable) link to the Holocaust, an Austrian grandma liking to make gnocchi, and Yiddishisms that the boy - who ought to know better - calls "German." The reader is shown much too little, and it's a shortcoming of these interesting stories.In some ways this book is a sort of psychic companion to Anne Roiphe's "1185 Park Avenue." Both detail the essential emptiness of a certain sort of 'good life,' and are sad and telling for having done so. Definitely worth reading.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. Reading it makes me feel odd and a little sad because the main charachter, Alex Fader, is not a real person and now I have to deal with being somewhat in love with a fictional charachter. The Sleep Over Artist follows the life of Alex Fader an odd, touching, introspective, wonderful man (well, he's a boy at the begining and a man later on). The book is divided into chapters but each chapter can stand on its own and read like a brilliant short story. A lot of the book deals with Alex's relationships with women and with each new woman we get to see into her head too. The Sleep Over Artist is the perfect combination of plot and detailed obsessive analysis of tiny little instances. It really is heartbreakingly good