Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer - review
Aesthetics: 8/10 Ethics: 7/10 Rhetoric: 9/10 Total: 8/10
Content warnings: suicide, self harm, depression, recreational drug use, non-explicit sex scenes, death by illness, and a sexual relationship between a minor and an adult.
Each evening was nearly a religious experience. The death girls would close their eyes and think of the suicides of their poets, of the sadness that filled every inch of space. Soon there would come that familiar off rising feeling in each of them, and whoever’s turn it was that particular night would begin to read the lines of a poem (8).
Edition reviewed: Wolitzer, M. (2014). Sleepwalking. New York: Riverhead Books.
Original publication: Wolitzer, M. (1982). Sleepwalking. New York: Random House.
Sleepwalking takes place two years after the death of the fictional poet Lucy Ascher, who killed herself after many years of depression defining her life and her poetry. It follows Claire Danziger, a first year university student with severe depression and an adoration of Ascher and her poetry. She meets two other girls who, like her, devoutly love a poet – Naomi, with Sylvia Plath, and Laura, with Anne Sexton. They are called the Death Girls. They meet each night, light candles, and talk about their poets and their deaths.
Claire begins a relationship with Julian, a boy unfamiliar with poetry and death, and she begins to feel unfulfilled in her relationship with Ascher’s poetry and the way it defines her life. Taking the advice of the other Death Girls, she finds the home of Lucy Ascher and offers her services as an au pair to Lucy’s parents, Ray and Helen. The plot diverges, Lucy’s childhood through to adulthood and death and the lives of her parents from the beginning of their relationship through to the ways her suicide both violently and insidiously changed their lives unveiling alongside Claire’s childhood and family history, while in the current day, Claire shares a home with the Aschers and the other Death Girls and Julian try to get her back.
Sleepwalking is a beautiful and winding expose on grief, human connection, and the way that writing and poetry can change and meld and save lives.
Aesthetics: 8/10
Perspective: First person Tense: Past tense Focalising characters: Four (Claire, Helen, Ray, Lucy) Style: Ruminative poetic prose, slightly varying with each focalising character. The influence of the poets on each Death Girl is clear in their speech. Characters: Very real and immensely sympathetic. World-building: Vivid, detailed, and just as Claire observes of Lucy’s poetry, Wolitzer ‘did the most incredible thing – she made death a landscape’ (17), but made it something liberating, rather than suffocating. Pacing and structure: Two parts in fourteen chapters; slow – the events of the novel in the current day span little more than a month, but could have been months.
Ethics: 7/10
Sleepwalking is unlike any other book I’ve read which focuses on mental illness and/or suicide, particularly in the context of books about artists, authors, or poets. It is very explicit in representation of self-harm and suicide, but it doesn’t romanticise them. The Death Girls do so in the beginning, but it changes over time. The book makes mental illness real and horrible in the characters’ own headspaces, and while the writing is poetic and beautiful, it doesn’t cast the themes in the same light. It makes beautiful the small, day to day and mundane things, and it also makes beautiful recovery and moving on, which is so rare, particularly in YA and NA books. The Death Girls stay loving their poets, but they stop self-destructing in the name of that love.
The portrayal of drug use and underage sex is somewhat detached – it preaches nothing.
It’s horrific for a stranger to come into the home of a celebrity’s parents under false pretences, and while it has a good result, it’s never quite acknowledged how invasive Claire was in coming to the Aschers.
The cast of characters is quite small and focused tightly on families; it’s not particularly diverse. The Danziger family is Jewish and it’s integrated through the text naturally, which is lovely. The portrayal of people of different ages was something I really appreciated – developing from childhood through to middle age, they all seemed real and dynamic, and the middle aged characters weren’t written with derision as they sometimes are in books centred on young adults. Their suffering and recovery are treated just as seriously as Lucy’s and as Claire’s.
Rhetoric: 8/10
I read this book in less than twenty-four hours, much of that reading time being between midnight and six a.m., which is a big deal. It was an experience of ‘can’t put it down’.
The Aschers so willingly taking Claire into their home seems, in hindsight, almost absurd, but midst the depth of their grief and the disruption of their lives of the years since their Lucy’s death, I didn’t even question it. However, they questioned it and themselves, and reflect on how it was a bizarre choice to make. Their self-awareness made it seem real.
Fun fact: Wolitzer says that the book ‘predates the Brat Pack era that would follow it in a couple of years; this book does not feature a college world ... of careless debauchery, but instead one of bookish, brooding self-consciousness’ (xiv). Funnily enough considering her scorn, Wolitzer has been considered part of the literary Brat Pack for decades, alongside those such as Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis. She is right, though – while still a part of the Brat Pack, as a campus novel it is far different from The Secret History or Rules of Attraction.
Would recommend: Yes, with the caveat that it could be triggering for some, and probably with a reading age of eighteen and up, with a limit of perhaps fifteen. If you don’t like ‘slow’ books it’s probably not for you.
Does it fit into Dark Academia? Yes! It’s pre-Dark Academia but has a clear influence on it and fits into the aesthetic, themes, and values of Dark Academia. It doesn’t, as Wolitzer said, have the focus on debauchery and decadence that many of the key Dark Academic texts do, and the Death Girls aren’t studying poetry – it’s extracurricular, with the University more of a setting based on their ages than part of the plot. Their rituals, cultishness, and taking on of Sexton, Plath, and Lucy Ascher is pretty archetypal of Dark Academia. It’s more ruminative and character based than plot and action based, but the questions of eternity and immortality, personal responsibility, the importance and joy of connection about something loved, and ‘what makes life worth living?’ are central.