RICCI STAYS UP ALL NIGHT
Novelist explores sleep disorder
For every outward sign of calm in the paintings of Alex Colville, every pastoral meadow and every horizon, there is a corresponding suggestion of menace: a stormy sky, say, or a gun on a table, observed Katherine Stauble in the National Gallery of Canada’s magazine earlier this year as a retrospective of the iconic Canadian artist’s work was opening at the Ottawa museum.
“In a Colville painting, it always seems as if something is about to happen.”
And so it is in the latest novel by Nino Ricci, Sleep (Doubleday Canada, 235 pages, $30). Its cover illustration is a reproduction of a Colville painting, depicting a shirtless man in khakis looking out at the ocean. We see him only from the back. On the table behind him is a gun.
Guns play a pivotal role in Ricci’s taut, grim and absorbing story, the sixth novel by the acclaimed Canadian author. So does sleep.
The book opens with the protagonist, the almost-famous Canadian academic David Pace, having fallen asleep at the wheel on the way home from a visit to the zoo with his five-year-old son. The boy cries out from his car seat in the back — “Dad, there’s a car!” — and in jerking him awake, keeps David from plowing into the vehicle stopped barely 100 yards in front of them on the highway shoulder.
“The sheerest luck has saved him from killing his son,” Ricci writes. It was three pages before I exhaled.
David suffers from a sleep disorder. Little by little, he’s coming undone in “a breakdown in the border that separated waking from sleep. As if sleep were some rebel force that David had let overrun him, leaving him condemned now to live in this place of constant incursion, where nothing was safe, nothing was certain.”
On the surface, David’s life seems charmed. He has done well early in his career. His wife is both accomplished and beautiful. Their home is a showplace. But not all is as it seems.
He stays late at the university trying to work on his new book, for instance — a doomsday book, about “how, in an instant, humans could revert from civilized to the savage ... only to have his brain go blue screen, waking with a start to find he’s been out for an hour or more and has filled the screen with gibberish or has somehow erased a whole day’s work,” Ricci writes. “And, of course, each time he works late, he adds a little more poison to his marriage, a little more silence.”
Ricci, 56, understands sleep disorder on a personal level: He has one. He’d had sleep problems for years — in university, he couldn’t get through the books on the reading lists for his courses without falling asleep — but it was only years later that he learned he has narcolepsy, in which the boundaries between wakefulness and slumber break down, often because of a lack of the brain chemical that regulates sleep.
When he learned of it, “I started to read about sleep and discovered how much goes on during sleep,” he said by phone recently. “Our memories form, our learning is consolidated, our bodies get repaired, our sense of self is repaired.”
Ricci relies on a regime of drugs for a facsimile of a normal sleep pattern, managing his disorder with the same mixture of drugs David uses, including methylphenidate (Ritalin), fluoxetine (Prozac) and sodium oxybate.
Although “there is obviously something of me in it,” Ricci’s book is not autobiographical. Indeed, he expresses profound gratitude in the acknowledgments section to his three children and his wife “for helping to spare me the fate of the protagonist in this novel.”
For David, Prozac “seems only to have sped up the process of extinguishing the person he thinks of as himself.”
Like Ricci, he had read about the role of sleep in virtually every mental function, from “repairing the neural wear and tear of the day” to “helping to hold intact the sort of unified self that makes it possible to face the world.”
And, David is having a hard time facing the world. His academic career had seemed promising, but now, in his 40s, that promise has stalled. He’s been unable to match the success of his first book — its thesis, it happens, stolen from a grad-school friend.
His relationships with family and colleagues, from whom he keeps his sleep disorder hidden, are adversarial. He sabotages himself at virtually every turn, and seems to operate entirely without a moral code: among his transgressions, he plagiarizes a student’s paper and date-rapes a potential hire in his department.
A serial cheater, he rewards the kindness shown by a former grad-school sidekick by having an affair with his wife.
David has difficulty being honest with himself, and he’s been pretending that his life isn’t a mess. For Ricci, David’s sleep disorder is a wake-up call that forces him to confront the lies. It also makes him even more selfdestructive. The guy is a train wreck. But I couldn’t turn away. I didn’t want to.
Ricci, winner of the Trillium award for his 2002 novel Testament and a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction, is a beautiful writer and a deft storyteller. On the wings of his graceful prose, the reader is carried forward and then back in time and then ahead again. Some sequences feel like dreams.
I devoured the book in barely three sittings — and then read it again to savour his language.
David comes to own a Second World War handgun that had been his late father’s.
“It’s as if the clue he searched for his whole childhood has suddenly been handed to him,” Ricci writes of his character’s reaction on holding the Beretta for the first time.
With a gun, he feels alert and focused for the first time in years. He acquires more guns, goes to shooting ranges and a hunting lodge and, ultimately, travels to a war-torn country in the Middle East — ostensibly to do research for his book. His search, says Ricci, mirrors a trend in society — “an attention-deficit world where you need something new every five minutes.”
As David’s professional and personal life continue to disintegrate, his disorder worsens.
“At the back of his mind, always with him now, the locusts of sleep, waiting to swarm,” Ricci writes.
On one hand, David is defiant. His wife thinks he’s amoral and irresponsible? OK, then: that’s how he’ll act. On the other hand, there is a tacit admission that beneath the arrogance with which he conducts himself lies a deep self-loathing.
When the affair with his friend’s wife ends, David talks about how, down the line, “people will see how irrelevant tenure is and who sleeps with whom.”
To Ricci, he’s asking: “‘What really matters? And how can I see what really matters — and who I really am?’ I saw almost a kind of integrity in his quest.”
Ricci said he’s been told his protagonist’s inherent unlikeability has been a factor in the reluctance of American publishers to take on the book. As a writer, he finds this dispiriting.
“What kind of perfect world do people live in?” he asks. “It makes you think that people don’t see in themselves their own darknesses. Everyone I know is flawed and makes mistakes.
“Literature is supposed to give you a place where you can face those darknesses and integrate them.”