Sleepless Nights

A dazzling and difficult, fragmented and garnet-dark autobiographical novel - in which Hardwick locates lost things, the singularity of places, and the images of those she has cared about from the Thirties up until the general vicinity of the present. As the times and places swing by - Kentucky ( the cemetery of home, education, nerves, heritage and tics ), Boston, Amsterdam, Maine, Manhattan - scenes and stories and people are caught in bits of lean prose and then brusquely strung together. Singer Billie Holiday, stately, sinister and determined. Stubbornly doomed domestic workers tripped up by the unfair disease of vulnerability and abrupt deprivations. Skin-and-bones Communists of the Thirties. The dead Ph.D.'s of the Manhattan cocktail scene, revived by wine in the evening to burst forth with brave little blossoms. A beautiful, self-indulgent, Marxist lover who switches his women from night to night. A courteous Dutch doctor who luxuriously cossets three women. A shopping-bag lady and a muddled, impoverished grande dame: strangers staring at each other on a N.Y. street, unaware of what they share - mad strength, hideous endurance. And a raucous club-car full of drunk men with bright clothes - those who labor at filling stations for families that are from their youth already in their eyes. This is a carefully choreographed dance of affective particles, and not easy to encompass. But each set-piece shimmers with piercing observation and long-nurtured feelings; and, though strenuous going as it's being absorbed, this memoir/novel/poem will quietly, slowly sort itself in the sympathetic reader's mind: The train seems to be always going straight ahead in the lucky, large empty country. (Kirkus Reviews)