SLEEP, by Honor Jones
What surprised me most about Honor Jones’s debut novel, “Sleep,” wasn’t its smarts or its savvy, or even its astute renderings of motherhood, daughter-hood and the fraught enterprise of trying to regard each one through the lens of the other. No, what surprised me was that out of its careful, orderly prose — every word neatly placed as if on a well-set table — grew an exceptionally moving novel.
Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material — the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll — and with similar delicacy and humor. But “Sleep” also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing.
“Sleep” doesn’t have the best start, but stick with it. The novel opens with the slightly humdrum threshold moments of 10-year-old Margaret’s life as she begins to notice her body and debate who she is in the world, a girl or a woman. (At the shoe store: “She definitely wasn’t going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn’t going to wear purple velvet stilettos either.”)
It all feels like a familiar coming-of-age story until Margaret experiences something no child should, putting a more sinister spin on what it means to “come of age” well before your time. From here the third-person perspective matures into Margaret’s adulthood, and the novel matures into something more poignant, and interesting, as well.
Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It’s the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — “by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,” Margaret thinks. “How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?”
Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered?
Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives.
If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of “Sleep” is that it’s grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling.
Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra’s apartment. She’s trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra’s new girlfriend’s anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother’s house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo’s birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It’s in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry:
Helen stood in her single sock, taping her picture up against the window. The sky outside was golden with late-day sun, but the light stopped abruptly at the glass. Inside was already beginning the blue evening, shadows padding the corners of the room. On the couch was Ezra, watching her, looking more cheerful than she’d seen him in weeks.
It’s chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window.
Jones is very good at capturing how trauma can taint even small moments like these, in subtle and insidious ways — which is perhaps why she’s styled her prose so tightly. There are no crescendos here, no soaring, looping sentences full of ecstasy or dread. Instead she’s hung her prose on a tension rod of unease, a proxy for how Margaret experiences her everyday life. It’s tidy, and it works.
SLEEP | By Honor Jones | Riverhead | 262 pp. | $28
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