Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
On 'Sleepless Nights'
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Elizabeth Hardwick's compressed, singular work Sleepless Nights was described when published in 1979 as a novel.[*] It bore, however, a peculiar relation to the genre. It was a novel without a plot, with a protagonist who shared the name of its author, and whose successive circumstances followed the known contours of Elizabeth Hardwick's life; a novel that could allow itself to move in any direction in time that it chose, that could shift its attention from one person or situation to another as abruptly as a filmmaker might splice two incongruous images; a novel that seemed to declare the impossibility of separating itself from life, yet admittedly one 'seeming to be true when all of it is not.' ('A good deal of the book,' Hardwick stated in an interview at the time, 'is, as they say, 'made up.'') Sleepless Nights might be taken as an exploration of the problem of genre, the problem of distinguishing fiction from what is so coarsely described as 'nonfiction,' except that the book is more like a demonstration that the problem is illusory.
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