So Many Ways to Sleep Badly

People sometimes ask me, who are the novelists of today that really matter? The truth is I like all sorts of books, and I throw around the five star rating pretty frequently, and yet "what matters" is a different breed of cat. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly isn't for everyone, but those of you who read it all the way through will have been through a life-changing experience. It is in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and a few others like him, that the future of New Narrative lies. As the title suggests, Sycamore brings the body into the story right upfront. His cranky, chatty, utopian narrator makes his money as a rent boy, and meanwhile pays the price of city living by calculating every atom of food that goes into his body and enduring endless sessions of strenuous yoga, and still chronic pain keeps him awake all night in his rented and rat-infested apartment in some Tenderloin tenement. Life is grim no matter what way you slice it, yet elements of heaven creep in sideways, like light through a Venetian blind. Friends see our hero through, a swirling cast of multiracial misfits and activists whose antics the speaker reports with the same naturalistic fascination he gives his food allergies. Sycamore updates Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City "gay central consciousness + kooky friends" formula but he also inverts it, blows it up as it were, with refreshing results. While Maupin's finest moments confront his characters with the political issues shaping their lives, Sycamore approaches politics at a cellular level--the sociopolitical forms the language he has to work with, and at every turn he's reading and quoting from some appalling misuse of words. If our hero knows "so many ways to sleep badly," it's largely because we are living during Goya's sleep of reason, and the nightmare of unrest stalks the land. Few other American novels have been able to penetrate so deeply into the psychic underbelly of a nation turned into wrath by an unjust war. As I read on I kept flashing back to an earlier period of English language writing, before irony took over, when it was to the novelists that ordinary citizens turned to for its news, when we read Norman Mailer's American Dream, or Why Are We in Vietnam, or Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, or James Baldwin's Another Country, to find out something we couldn't see on TV. As I say, So Many Ways is a perplexing book in some ways, and every page has something to offend, but its rewards are serious and many, and at his best Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has an electrifying prose style, like eels on acid.

I just finished reading 'so many ways to sleep badly' and it was a real treat... I felt so involved and touched be the narrator's voice and experience. this was a new writing style for me to experience- it is very stream of consciousness and i am used to more traditional, linear development. but i ended up enjoying this approach because i felt like it said so much more. i enjoyed reading how the narrator navigates intimacy in their life, and who suffers from horrible sleep, but still manages to face life with a beautiful approach.