WAKE-UP CALL
No sympathy to be found for plight of self-indulgent narcissist
A writer’s mind unravels in Nino Ricci’s Sleep. Plus, a memoir from Wab Kinew, and Yannick Bisson’s top reads.
Midway into his new novel, Sleep, the acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci has the book’s hero, a marginally famous academic/writer named David Pace, confess to a young woman he’s intent on seducing that he’s “an insufferable narcissist pr---” — that in a nutshell is the problem with this book. Pace is an irritatingly self-absorbed, supercilious schmuck — and the sleep disorder from which he suffers is no excuse.
Don’t get me wrong, there is much to commend this book, including long bouts of wonderful writing, but this reader had to work, manfully, to arouse much sympathy for the novel’s central protagonist He’s quite simply one of the most thoroughly disagreeable characters I’ve encountered in recent fiction. So when Pace meets his inevitable comeuppance at the novel’s conclusion, any sense of his demise being redemptive is trumped by another emotion: Good riddance to bad rubbish.
At the novel’s outset, Pace almost kills himself and his son by dozing off, momentarily, behind the wheel of his car and that near-death experience catalyzes a series of events that go from bad to worse to end-of-days catastrophic. Here’s a quick laundry list of Pace’s many failings: His father’s final words to him were “You want me dead.” His greatest achievement, an opus called Masculine History, was cribbed from the work of his grad- school sidekick Greg Borovic with whose wife he has a shockingly disturbing sadomasochistic affair. But systemic plagiarism, date rape, a condescending attitude toward all his colleagues are merely the tip of Pace’s personality quirks. He has horrendous parenting skills, and a genius for burning every professional bridge he crosses. And snorting lines of Ritalin is not a convincing justification.
At the novel’s conclusion, Pace dispatches himself to a Middle East hellhole to conduct ground research for his “doomsday book” on failed states. When jihadist terrorists overrun the city, journalists wisely flee. But David, being true to his self-described persona as an insufferable narcissistic pr---, decides to stay for “an interview he doesn’t need for a book he will never finish.” Smart calculus. Not. As a denouement, such Hemingwayesque bravado might parse as heroic. But sadly it just seems self-indulgent and dumb. Like David Pace’s life. Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.