Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
In Sleepless Nights, a lady compiles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, photos, messages, hopes, and fantasies as she looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of geography. This brilliantly realized, gritty, lyrical book, which brilliantly blends fact and invention, is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s best work of fiction but also one of the greatest achievements in American literature over the past fifty years.
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
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We get a sense of the ancient, smokey jazz clubs of New York City and long-gone hotels of bygone eras from her Kentucky background as one of nine children through to her graduate studies at Columbia in New York. We follow her life, her friends, and her experiences in an unbiased manner as we travel to her spacious summer home in Maine and stay there as well as in Boston, Vermont, Connecticut, and Europe.
The writing is superb, the plot is incredibly illustrative, and at points, it almost had a surreal feel. The unorthodox writing style made it feel all the more intimate to me as if she were reliving her former experiences with an old friend.
This way of thinking permeates the entire short novel. Like the crane, the lettering is delicate and precise. The memories may or may not correspond to what is remembered. This book demands that you read it at a rate that would consign most novels to oblivion because the style outweighs the content. This is a reflection on perception, its bias, selectivity, and the characteristics of human character. It is a perpetually depressing farewell to the past.
It is still only one viewpoint of a particular past, but it is quite admirable for the skillfully produced prose and, as far as one can discern, the clarity of judgment. Perhaps because I don’t know much about the author’s life, this reader’s empathy was not capable of sustained acclaim.
Hardwick’s insightful writings on numerous 20th-century novelists are collected in the outstanding and entertaining book “American Fictions.” Author Elizabeth Hardwick is sadly underappreciated. Although this book is brief, its meaning is deep. It seems as though she distilled her life’s most profound lessons into a few short paragraphs. She belongs to a select group of authors who possess the uncommon ability to speak the unsayable.
