Customer Reviews

The Sleep-Over Artist: Fiction

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The main setting for this novel is the concrete canyons of New York City where the main character, Alex Fader, spends his childhood in a high-rise apartment. Having personally grown up in a small town in the northwest, I have always regarded New Yorkers as being from an alien culture. This novel, perhaps, explains some of that culture.

The novel is written in a narrative form as related by the main character. It is written as a series of related short stories, initially about incidents in his childhood, and then about relationships with a succession of women. He is not exactly a gigolo, but is somewhat a parasite as he camps out with various girlfriends. He drifts through various jobs, including drummer with a rock band (with a girlfriend who makes sheep noises), but is not overly successful at anything.

Just as Alex seems to be developing a serious relationship, it abruptly ends and he is back with his mother. It seemed like there was a chapter or two missing. It is a somewhat interesting novel, but easy to set aside.

I had been waiting a longtime to read, "The Sleep-Over Artist" by Thomas Beller. I had heard great things about it, and I genuinely excited about it. But, sadly, it didn't live up to what I had hoped. I found it melodramatic and down right boring in spots. I never really knew what the author was talking about, and in what time frame we (as the reader) were dealing with. It was confusing and a bit too choppy for my taste. I was disappointed and wished for more.

I found this to be a well written, captivating book. It was so captivating that I read it three times. I normally do not like, or read very much fiction . What drew me to this book was the fact that I like Thomas Beller's non-fiction writing so much. I was therefore very curious to see what his fiction would be like. I started out by reading Seduction Theory, his excellent book of short stories, several of which deal with Alex Fader, the main character of this book. To my surprise, I liked it very much. So I decided to read this book next.
I was not disappointed. I found the writing to be excellent. The character of Alex Fader is well drawn, very complex and very interesting. I found the book to be ultimately very moving. Alex Fader is not always an easy character to like or understand, but his internal conflicts and great vulnerability eventually draw the reader into liking him and being concerned about his fate in life. Mr. Beller has done an excellent job with this book.

While at times engaging, this coming-of-age tale ultimately didn't bring anything new to the genre. I was never so bored that I put it down, but nor did I find any of the characters particularly engaging... they seem to float through life, never connecting with anyone, including the reader. There were points where the narrative jumped sideways in a jarring way, especially towards the end, that were too abrupt, unexplained, and made the book unsatisfying. Good material, but needs a good editor!

THE SLEEPOVER ARTIST sounded like an interesting premise and I wanted to like the novel because I liked the author's writing style, but it was a snoozer and I just couldn't finish. I made it about 3/4 through and decided I had wasted enough of my precious reading time. It was time to move on to something else.

THE SLEEPOVER ARTIST is told in several different short stories and each one may have an interesting plot here and there, but as a novel, it didn't seem to work. The stories weren't very cohesive for me. Just as I got interested (a little) in one plotline, the next chapter would jump several years later or several years earlier. It made me appreciate the characters less as I tried to figure out how everything fit together to tell me a story about Alex, the main character.

After reading 3/4 of the book, I found that I really didn't know much about Alex. Worse, I didn't care what happened to him or any of the characters in the "novel," so I gave up. Therefore, sadly, I can't recommend this book, but I hope the author matures in his plotlines for future novels.

Thomas Beller's The Sleep-Over Artist is a novel-in-short-stories, all centered on the character of Alex Fader. Alex is a Jewish kid who lives on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, and has the childhood experiences unique to natives of that island. We first meet Alex in the seventies when he is six years old and we follow him to his early twenties. There is no real story to the novel - it is merely a collection of episodes forming a sort of Bildungsroman. To say the least, Alex is a morally ambivalent character and he is not always likeable. The book's title and its blurbs lead one to believe that it is more risqué than it actually is. Yet it is well-written and provides a good look into the life of a young, educated, Manhattanite.

This is an enjoyable but amateurish book about a shallow and annoying young man who passes through a succession of unsuccessful romantic relationships, along with some other significant life events. Various stylistic flaws should have been caught by an editor. For instance, especially in the first half of the book, Beller is given to juxtaposing contradictory emotions: too often we read of the main character's "mixture of malevolence and love," or "a mixture of sadness and exasperation and sexual excitation." Beller is no doubt trying to sound emotionally profound in these passages, but he doesn't make the effort to explicate these ambivalences realistically. Further, the book also does not end, it just terminates. And yet, on occasion Beller says something truly insightful, as in my favorite scene when the main character, Alex, tries to kiss a woman he'd been wooing through feigned indifference; finding himself rebuffed, he bows out awkwardly, admitting that once you've tried to kiss a woman and failed, you can't return to the indifference routine. But such rare gems are few and far between. In sum, this book is better than watching commercials, but for something better read A Trip to the Stars.

I was excited at the potential of this book, and continued to the end with the hopes that it would get past being a sappy, indulgent glimpse into the unispired and uninspiring activities and thoughts of Beller's "every guy". Very empty and very disappointing.

These stylish and modern short stories very nearly form a novel. Each concerns the experiences and observations of bereft narrator/subject Alex Fader, a thoughtful, materially privileged but heartbroken (New York) city boy, only child of intellectuals, and then Alex as a young man. In fact, Alex is rather innocently appealing - until, in a story which totally undermined my faith in him, he molests his elderly aunt's housekeeper.

In precise, smart, but disassociative prose, Beller's deadpan narrator leads the reader on a sad boy's tour of 1970's Manhattan for the moderately privileged - and then London. Prep school, Manhattan upper-class landmarks (apartment buildings, neighborhoods, clubs, bakeries, and more) and diversions figure heavily in the stories. The boy's psychoanalyst father, benign, "handsome," but barely-known by his son, has died of cancer - quickly. Alex embarks on a series of quiet adventures in order to grieve for that painfully absent father. There is no solace. His mother, a subtle and appealing stranger, dotes on him, and he loves her.

There are several puzzling small details which a fact-checker might have spotted: a misunderstanding of the symptoms of Alzheimer's, a convenient but utterly undeveloped (and therefore, not believable) link to the Holocaust, an Austrian grandma liking to make gnocchi, and Yiddishisms that the boy - who ought to know better - calls "German." The reader is shown much too little, and it's a shortcoming of these interesting stories.

In some ways this book is a sort of psychic companion to Anne Roiphe's "1185 Park Avenue." Both detail the essential emptiness of a certain sort of 'good life,' and are sad and telling for having done so. Definitely worth reading.

One lesson we've always learned is "don't believe everything you read." This includes summaries on the backs of books! If you were to read the synopsis on the back of The Sleep-Over Artist, you'd be incorrectly led to believe that this is a novel or at least a book containing a somewhat normal flow of events and plot. However, Beller has constructed a "fiction" of short stories linked only by their main character and his romantic experiences.

The fact that the blurb on the back of the book was misleading does not mean that this is a disappointing book. In fact, from a writing perspective, its very interesting the way in which Beller constructed The Sleep-Over Artist, following one character and revealing snapshots of his life to the reader. But this structure is also maddening at times. While the stories follow a standard time-line, tracing the main character from youth to his late 20's, almost all of these stories go unresolved. And following stories merely give slight insight into any resolution that has occurred. In fact, some characters are re-introduced as though the reader has not yet met the characters.

All these things combined, I'm not sure I understand Beller's intent. Did he originally start off writing short stories involving a central character and then decide to throw them into one volume? Are these autobiographical stores in which he changed the names and arranged them into this collection? Or did he begin with the intention of taking snapshots of the life of his main character and lose his way somewhere along the line? It's not clear. The Sleep-Over Artist is worth reading for its humor and insight into the frailty of relationships but the flaws of the structure of this fiction often overshadow the actual prose.