Archived Review:

Reviewed by Peter Darbyshire and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father was one of those under-the-radar books -- a small print run by a small publisher, getting by on word of mouth -- and then it received star treatment by the New York Times and was picked by the Today Show book club.

The question, of course, is it worth the buzz?

Peter Darbyshire, co-editor of Bookninja.com, and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of the story collection Way Up, discuss the book to give you the answer.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father is an insanely funny, jaw-droppingly weird story of what, in most other hands, would have been a worst-case scenario turned melodrama, but in Sharpe's is a worst-case scenario turned classic. The novel hinges on Chris Schwartz's dad, Bernie, inadvertently taking the wrong depression medication and consequently falling into a coma from which he does not return intact. The Sleeping Father has the signposts of a ripping bildungsroman except for the small, amusing detail that the main focus of the book is Bernie's regression to a childhood state. It's no surprise that Matthew Sharpe waves the Salinger flag by page 11:

Then they'd crammed Catcher in the Rye plus the puke back down his throat and he puked them up and then they crammed down Catcher in the Rye plus his puked puke and by now it was easier just to swallow. This wasn't Catcher in the Rye's fault. It was probably a halfway decent book, if you were from Bulgaria and had never heard of it; decent for a book, that is, which wasn't saying much. There was no book that was good.

Sharpe's clearly a keen ironist. And this is Salinger on acid.

Chris's sister, Cathy, is a cultural Jew in search of Jesus. Her tentative, false, righteous adoration for the Jewish convert saint, Edith Stein, whom she discovered on the internet, and her typical, teenage girl self-hatred are pitch perfect. Sharpe not only manages to poke fun without sacrificing the readerís sympathy for her, but also crosses some generally pretty clear thresholds of political correctness.

Cathy is just on the cusp of her angst years, but Chris is deep into them. He's miserable and his misery is first compounded by his father's new circumstance, then mitigated by it. Bernard's slow rebirth gives Chris a life focus; he will rehabilitate his father, an idea that will only be realized with wicked infusions of Sharpian slapstick. There is not one lousy character in this book but still "Chris" is a masterful feat of writing. Essentially, he's a dorky, budding failure type to whom Sharpe has bestowed a wild, strangely erotic and mildly psychopathic inner life, of which snippets, usually the least palatable, burble up for airing. You have to love him.

Peter Darbyshire: I started reading this book in the bath -- which is where I start all new books -- and when I read the jacket copy I almost tossed the book into the bubbles. I couldn't believe I'd been suckered into reading another dysfunctional family saga, especially one featuring "the loss of innocence," "the nature of language and meaning" and "the spirituality of selfhood." The George Saunders quote on the back motivated me enough to open the book and start reading though, and I'm glad I did. The Sleeping Father isn't the serious-sounding Literary Novel it's made out to be on the copy. It's serious, sure -- but serious in a George Saunders way, not a Don DeLillo way. It's a funhouse mirror of the American Family novel.

I agree that Chris is a great character, the kind that lives beyond the book. He's just such a fresh example of teenage self-loathing. I started believing him completely on the second page, when he feels he's not even worthy of his shitty suburban surroundings:

He looked at the street again, and the cars parked in the driveways, and he marveled at how each car had a driveway to park in and how every driveway in the world had a street at one end and a house at the other. Chris felt that if he'd been the guy they came to when they needed someone to invent the thing to convey the cars from the streets to the houses, he'd have choked, he'd have let down humanity.

I also love the sense of exhaustion that pervades the book, which is the heart of its contemporary sensibility. It's so nicely summed up in Frank's notebook, entitled Everything in the World, which is mostly just observations on the endless parade of meaningless simulacrums the world has become:

the world was weary of itself -- had trod, had trod, had trod, or whatever; now ground out shoddy reproductions of stuff it used to take pride in producing. Trees, shrubs, cats, people, clouds, and stars were now "trees," "shrubs," "cats," "people," "clouds," "stars."

So of course itís significant when the book gets lost....

And I laughed out loud when Chris, after "entering American History," gives a history presentation in which he says Nixon killed Trotsky with an icepick and describes Martin Luther King as a "cockswain," and ends by playing Nirvana's "Serve the Servants." That scene says it all about the turn of the century.

Kathryn: Oh, and once the book is lost, Frank Dial begins a new book entitled: Everything I Hate and it is a debauched version of the first, lost book. If note taking and list making can be said to be a sort of ordering or God playing, what can you make of Sharpe's narrator? The third-person omniscient in a secular novel is a pretty risky decision. Well, this isn't exactly an omniscient narrator but it's a strange new hybrid point-of-view that flits about, entering the queer minds of any character at any given time. Mostly the story seems to be told third-person limited, from the POV of Chris Schwartz, but then all of a sudden we enter Cathy, or Frank Dial, or Lisa Danmeyer, the ambitious, young and sexy neurologist who looks after Bernie.

Margaret Drabble sometimes uses a sort of busybody-next-door narrator to get at her characters. This means that one's knowledge of any of her characters is somewhat limited by how much you trust in the gossip of such people. It's very difficult to place Matthew Sharpe's narrator and, even though I am likely far too self-conscious a reader, I did find it occasionally intrusive. Who is speaking and if it isn't God, who is it? Having said that, I don't think Sharpe could have written such a tender book without this device. And the writing is so incredibly fresh and vivid, that I was nevertheless disarmed by his, well, seemingly impossible narrator.

Peter: Yeah, the narrative POV was curious. I normally get irritated by narrative voices I can't justify -- that is, voices that don't originate in a character or don't follow some sort of clear logic, such as trying to be the voice for a particular generation or sensibility (I'm thinking here of DeLillo's narrator in Pafko at the Wall). Sharpe seems to use the narrative voice and POV mainly for effect as opposed to any strict logic, but in this case it didn't bother me, partially because, as you say, the writing is so good, but also partially because that casual style fits the book. These characters drift through their world without really getting excited about anything, and the narrative reflects that. The fact that the narrative doesn't stick with one character also gives it a nice distance -- the reader is able to look at them all with some critical distance. As for God, the end of Chapter 4 tells us the narrative POV isn't his:

At the end of "Serve the Servants," a few people clapped faintly. Frank Dial made a teetering gesture with his right hand that meant something along the lines of comme ci, comme ca. Inside the mind of Richard Stone, a place inaccessible to Communism or God, violent thoughts gathered and swarmed.

I really liked the Richard Stone character, and I wanted to see more of him. He's not just a jock but every nerd's nightmare understanding of a jock: "hatred made flesh." I appreciated the fact that Chris and Frank actually have to deal with a genuine psychopath for a classmate. Ah, the memories....

In fact, all the characters are sort of grotesque exaggerations of archetypes -- the insane jock, the sexy nurse, the quiet father, the suicidal teen -- to the point they almost seem teenage fantasies gone wild. Maybe that gets back to the narrative POV. Maybe the entire world is seen from a teenager's perspective.

Kathryn: Yes, your "teenager's perspective" solves my problem with Sharpe's POV. My eldest child is nearing puberty and already he thinks he knows everything. The teenage boy is a sort of god, in this sense.

I'm happy to report that the book's humour and Sharpe's craft are not diminished by a second read. I'm still laughing at the scene in which Bernie goes to the pharmacy to get his new Prozac prescription. The portrayal of a chemically dependent America as viewed through the pharmacist, Bill Yardley, is, in my opinion, Matthew Sharpe's finest moment:

Bill Yardley had used to greet Bernie warmly, but had turned cooler once he began self-prescribing Paxil. Bill Yardley took Paxil because he'd been afraid of his customers. The fear was painful, resisted all his efforts to understand it, and depressed him. The Paxil cured the fear and depression, but had a peculiar side effect: Yardley found himself less kind and helpful to his customers now that he was no longer afraid of them.

And then:

Thus Paxil made Yardley less depressed and more efficient, but also less happy and not as good at his job, his own unbearable fear having been his most sensitive and useful instrument of community relations.

What also kills me, every time I read it, is the Day Of Dodgeball in which Chris's school shuts down for the morning in order to reenact some obscure Revolution battle by way of having the teachers hurl dodgeballs at the students until they are all "killed." It is an inspired moment detailing the brutality of that terrifying microcosm "high school." The diminishment of American pride to the point of a dodgeball flaying is dead-on, I think. It's no wonder that Chris and Frank Dial are so nihilistic. There is no higher ideal. It had deteriorated into ridicule.

Sharpe's joyride never lets up in this regard. Laugh all you want, but Chris's misogyny in the face of abandonment by his lawyer mum (Lila), Frank Dial's dissatisfaction with racial divisions, Cathy's search for a God that fits her particular needs, Bernie's child-state, Lisa Danmeyer's neurotic achieving (further symbolized by her job as a neurologist), Lila's inappropriate sexual boundaries -- these are all symptoms of the disaster that Sharpe tells us is befalling America. He tells this charmingly, but he tells it nonetheless. I highly recommend this excellent book.

Peter: The Day of Dodgeball was brilliant. I remember well the terror and exhilaration dodgeball invoked in me as a teen. More exhilaration though, given that I'm German. And to play a game of simulated mass murder in a high school in the post-Columbine era -- well, this book is as gutsy as it is brilliant.

The way Sharpe reduces supposedly meaningful things to the point of caricature reminds me of George Saunders, although Sharpe is much quieter in his approach. But there's a similar undermining of values and icons taking place -- or perhaps an exaggeration, to the point of the grotesque. Chris's fumbling attempts to express his emotions to his father, played out in the scene in which he disfigures his comatose father with an indelible marker, certainly falls into the latter realm.

The thing that really struck me about the book on a second read was how the characters constantly reinvent themselves. Bernard Schwartz has to learn to speak and walk again; Cathy becomes a Christian even though she's Jewish, but there's the distinct feeling it's all just a teenage phase for her; Chris constantly re-evaluates and re-imagines himself; Chris and Frank keep reworking the terms of their relationship -- their spontaneous kiss just being one example -- and so on. But there's never any sense of progress. Instead, the stories the characters tell themselves about their lives are ultimately as meaningless and unreal as Chris's history lesson about Paul Robeson, or they're just variations on a theme. Progress, the future, growth, even narrative development -- they're all replaced with a sense of recycling, of the same things just being replayed over and over, with nothing new ever being possible. It's not only a world of "shoddy reproductions," it's a world of endless, empty, shoddy reproductions. As you say, there's a comment here about America, if not Western society in general.

So the book has all the trademarks of a coming-of-age novel, but at the same time it goes nowhere. Sharpe creates a wonderful tension that's maintained all the way through to the last moment of the book, which -- and I'm not giving anything away here -- is simultaneously heartwrenchingly emotional and deeply cynical. It's as if Pat Conroy were channelling Jean Baudrillard. And who wouldn't want to read that?

I recommend The Sleeping Father too. Buy a copy of this book right away -- then give it to your nearest school library and buy another copy for yourself.

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