Give it a rest
Uneven offering delves into the torture of insomnia
The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping Samantha Harvey Grove
Insomnia is about chasing the impossible, about lying awake and trying not to focus on the only thing you can think about, occasionally drifting down the slope toward sleep and then — sensing this! — jolting awake once more. Like money, sleep functions on a delicate web of trust, and Samantha Harvey’s often brilliant and sometimes frustrating new book anatomizes what happens when we stop believing.
Harvey is a British writer who has published four novels to critical acclaim but muted sales, and was well on her way to the uncoveted status of writer’s writer when in mid-2016, disaster struck. Moving to a new home on a noisy road, and with her equilibrium unbalanced by anger at the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, she stopped sleeping.
The Shapeless Unease is subtitled A Year of Not Sleeping, but this is misleading: First, Harvey suffered for more than a year (it was still happening late in 2018, when she published an essay about it); and second, it wasn’t quite not sleeping. Most nights Harvey did sleep, but fitfully.
Harvey conveys the hell of insomnia with the precision and passion of one who has come to know it too well. “There’s terror when a basic animal need isn’t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens — you fear life. You no longer want your life, not on these terms.”
The cause of Harvey’s sleeplessness was plainly anxiety, an inability of the mind to sit still, initiated by Brexit and the upheaval of a new home but then efficiently self-sustaining. She discussed it with her doctor and therapist, and reproduces extracts from these circular, combative conversations.
When The Shapeless Unease remains focused on its subject, it engages and grips. Harvey complains about the futility of describing the feeling of insomnia, but she does as good a job as you would expect a gifted novelist to at relaying the brain fog, the mind turning in on itself. Her relationship with writing becomes ambiguous: On the one hand, it is impossible. On the other hand, “writing has saved my life,” she writes. “I am sane when I write, my nerves settle.”
This may explain why so much of the book contains writing that seems to be there purely for its own pleasure. And she includes numerous digressions of tangential relevance: Buddhism, William James on reason, the limitations of language used by the Amazonian Pirahã people. There’s no question that these are all beautifully done, but the creaks are audible as she tries to link them back to her topic.
And there is nothing on the science of insomnia, nor its cultural history. Harvey does gesture outward a few pages before the end, with discussion of Shakespeare’s references to sleep. But, like finally falling into peaceable slumber at 6 a.m., it’s just too late.