PHILIP MARCHAND
‘The hero is faced with a massive, dense, interwoven fabric of woe’
Sleep Nino Ricci Doubleday 256 pp; $30
For a supposedly intelligent man classics professor David Pace, the protagonist of Nino Ricci’s novel Sleep, is a dab hand at making trouble for himself. He’s started out well enough — published a book, Masculine History, one of those rare academic works that creates a stir in the media. It features a new approach to history, sufficiently intriguing to interest a general reader while being dismissed by most of his colleagues. “For every good review David got in the mainstream press for Masculine History, there had been a snide one in the academic journals,” Ricci writes. More serious, as the novel proceeds, is the suspicion of plagiarism that accumulates around David’s public success.
Still, it’s quite an achievement. He also has a comely wife, Julia, who is eager to spend their money on refurbishing a house with faux antiques, and a son named Marcus, a likely lad though perhaps emotionally debili- tated by fierce arguments between his parents, often with Marcus as the subject. For one thing, David resents Julia’s gentrification schemes — a thoroughgoing intellectual himself, he has little sympathy for Julia’s nesting instincts, her “vestigial need to make a house.”
The couple has other sore points. Julia believes she has sacrificed her own university teaching career for her husband’s, a truism in the historiography of the family commonwealth with just enough substance to make it an ongoing fretful issue.
Worst of all his problems, however, is a rare sleep disorder, a malady that forbids him rest. For a solution he turns to a “sleep doctor” named Becker. The latter, Ricci muses, “had been happy to pry him with every sort of psychotropic, pushing his doses to the upper limits with each new cocktail as if he were an expendable specimen in a rat trial ... Drugs to boost his serotonin or his dopamine or his norepinephrine; a so-called smart drug promising seventy-two hours wakefulness at a stretch; time-released drugs with delivery systems as sophisticated as an ICMB’s.” His basic regiment, however, is an “unholy trinity” of Ritalin, Prozac and Viagra.
Despite this trinity, he falls asleep while driving a car with Marcus on board. When Julia finds out, she launches a successful divorce proceeding, which is also the beginning, for David, of a long, inexorable train of self-destruction. He spends a fortune, for example, in hiring divorce lawyers with no good results whatsoever.
Sleep, then, has some of the elements of the groves of academe novel — a protagonist who is beset by envious colleagues, treacherous deans and department heads, wayward faculty wives, a landscape strewn with gender and racial minefields. For all his bantering and smartass ways Pace wearies, as he puts it, of “going day after day without a single warm look, a single connection with someone he trusts.”
Sleep can also be viewed, in part, as a novel of intergenerational conflict, featuring David at odds with the memory of his feisty firstgeneration Italian immigrant father, a successful businessman who viewed with disdain his son’s bookish career. David swears that “he would never do what his own father had done, make an enemy of his son,” but somehow he fails that test. Why? How was it that the sons turned into the fathers? “What if,” David comments, “the only real obstacle between them had been that they’d both clung to the same insoluble lump, their stupid pride?”
Meanwhile, his real enemies are those demons whose names are pharmaceutical. He fears that, under the regime of prescription drugs, the dark side of his mind will be released. “He awoke every morning with the same thankfulness that he hadn’t yet wrecked things,” Ricci writes. His dreams also become more vivid. “(T)he constant tossing and turning, the sense of hovering the whole night in a hallucinatory purgatory in which his dreams had so much of the nagging insistence of the waking world that he arose exhausted from them. It was like a slow descent into madness.”
Under the regime of prescription drugs, the dark side of his mind will be released
David finds a modicum of relief from his pharmaceutical grip in an unlikely source, when he comes across a Second World War vintage handgun, a Beretta, which belonged to his father. He likes the sensation of firing it. “When he is peering into his sights, the world falls away,” Ricci writes. “There is only the finger on the trigger, only the bullet barrelling forward like his own will. It is better than any brain drug.” Later, when he takes up hunting he discovers he can go a whole day without meds.
From the beginning of the novel, then, the hero is faced with a massive, dense, interwoven fabric of woe, an array of difficulties he cannot begin to solve. As he begins to make progress on one front — bonding with his son — he is undone on another front, that of his old nemesis, sex. (Sex, for David, is a “compulsion, a darkness.”) It begins to look as if his only solution is indeed the recourse to armed violence favoured by his ancestors in the days of the Roman Empire and still embraced by multitudes in the present.
Something like this is suggested by the occasions when the hero does feel truly awake. After narrowly averting a car crash at the beginning of the novel, David experiences the sensation of “being fully awake, of being full alive.” In similar fashion, after firing a pistol, “every fibre in him feels fully awake.” The last sentence of the novel, when David is threatened by heavily armed young thugs in the Middle East, reads, “He has never felt more awake.”
Sleep, then, is not a jolly read. It is one of Ricci’s most deeply felt novels, however, and one of his riskiest.