April 21, 2022 39Yet the mist of impersonality occa-
sionally parts, and never more dramat-
ically than when she passes judgment
on characters. There is a hint of her
in Jude the Obscure’s Sue, who is as
original in her “intellectual alien-
ation”—“Sue thinks,” she insists—as
Arabella, “the hard, needy, shackling”
wife, is conventional. She reveals her-
self more openly in her discussion of
The Kreutzer Sonata. Her description
of Countess Sonya Tolstoy, destroyed
by her husband’s portrait of her in his
novella, lurches into free-floating gen-
eralities: “An adjutant, wracked by
drama, brilliant in her arias; and then
awakening to uncertainty, shame.”But Hardwick must have tired of hid-
ing behind the third person, hitching
her love and her anger to remote figures
and veiled judgments. Sleepless Nights
is often described as an autobiograph-
ical novel, a memoir, or only “half fic-
tion,” a mongrel breed. It is easy to
dwell on the signs of real life—Ken-
tucky, the Hotel Schuyler, the letters to
friends the narrator signs “Elizabeth,”
the intimation of a recent divorce. “I
was then a ‘we,’” the narrator recalls.
“Husband-wife: not a new move to be
d iscovered i n that strong classica l trad i-
tion.” “Can it be that I am the subject? ”
she asks, contemplating the pose of a
then-typical female protagonist: the
middle-aged divorcée, the newly sin-
gle woman in New York City. Or could
it be that the subject is not a singular
person, a self whose interior life broad-
ens and deepens over the course of a
predestined plot? What if the subject
is a pattern, a structure? The pattern is
easy to recognize in Sleepless Nights—
this is a novel of the unwived, seeking
and receiving acknowledgment, assis-
tance, and a sense of dignity. To tell the
story of the unwived is a new move in
the tradition that also moved Hardwick
away from it.
The unwived are not only women.
They are bachelors and queers and ut-
terly unmarriageable Marxists. They
are widowers, unwived in a sadder
sense of the term. They are the poor,
the immolated, the estranged; charac-
ters who belong to no one, who have no
families and no novels to call home. Yet
those who have read Sleepless Nights
recognize the women as afflicted old
friends, visitors from the narrator’s
childhood and adolescence, showing
up unexpectedly at her doorstep. Here
are Judith, Marie, Juanita, Simone, and
Billie Holiday, “because never was any
woman less a wife.” Without protest,
they submit to the narrator’s gaze, to
the cool tenderness of her style. Age
and care do not fall away. They are
exalted. Here is Miss Cramer, her old
neighbor, roaming the street on a bitter
December morning:Miss Cramer in winter in a dress of
printed silk, soiled here and there
with a new pattern of damage. She
is wearing torn canvas shoes and
no stockings to cover her bruised,
discolored legs, nothing to help the
poor naked ankles caked with bar-
nacles of dirt.She meets another solitary traveler:She approaches an appalling
wreck of great individuality, a
black woman who wanders in and
out of the neighborhood, coversthe streets with purposeful speed.
No one has ever seen the black
woman’s mouth, since the whole
lower part of her face is always
bound tight with a sort of turban
of woolen cloth. Fear of germs, dis-
figurement, or symbol of silence?From these wrecks of individuality
rises a collective subject, grotesque
almost to grandeur. “They are gladia-
tors, creatures of the trenches,” Hard-
wick writes. They do not speak to one
another, do not disclose anything of
themselves. Their mouths remain shut
and bound. But the novel recognizes
and reflects them both, as it does all
the unwived. It honors their terrible,
decadent freedom. “Beauty formed out
of negatives,” the narrator thinks. A
whole formed out of the scattered and
shattered selves of history.
Gathering and arranging and scru-
tinizing the unwived with a “prying
sympathy,” the narrator reveals herself
obliquely in the pattern she creates.
“I love to be known by those I care
for,” she thinks in the novel’s final sen-
tences. “Public assistance, beautiful
phrase.” The phrase appeared around
twenty years earlier, in Hardwick’s
essay “The Insulted and Injured:
Books About Poverty”: “I think I
read recently that before many years
have passed it is expected that nearly
half the residents of Manhattan will
be living on public assistance.” But
by the time Hardwick started writing
Sleepless Nights, social welfare was as
much a thing of the past as the prom-
ise of happily ever after. The ruins of
marriage smolder in the ruins of the
welfare state. In the middle stands
the critic turned novelist, though it
should be clear that the distance be-
tween these identities has, by now,
dwindled. She does not patronize. She
does not prophesy. She does not look
down at her subjects from her perch
of omniscience. She shares in their
defacement. In her hands, the novel
emerges as a form of public assistance,
dispersed without expectation of rec-
ompense, without judgment of “sloth
and recurrent mistakes.”
When Sleepless Nights was pub-
lished, McCarthy sent a letter to
Hardwick praising her achievement.
She went on to explain that she had
not anticipated how Hardwick would
deal with the huge fact of her famous
husband:It didn’t occur to me that you could
do it simply by leaving him out.
That’s a brilliant technical stroke
but proves to be much more than
that: he becomes a sort of black
hole in outer space, to be filled in
ad lib, which is poetic justice; he’s
condemned by the form to non-
existence—you couldn’t do that in a
conventional autobiography.The poor, unwived beauties of Sleep-
less Nights are ringed around this black
hole—call it the husband, call it the
state—like mirrors placed on opposite
walls. In their reflections flash the eyes
of the critic, who has retrieved from the
darkness the miracle of pure style and
the model of communal history. Mc-
Carthy was right to conclude that the
husband had been condemned to non-
existence. But she had failed to grasp
the full force of her observation. Where
he went, the wife was sure to follow,
nipping at the heel. Q“Beautifully conceived
and written”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Sink your teeth into
something salacious
and meaningful
with this novel.”
—Nylon
“Brilliant, wise, and wistful.
A look at a private school in the 1960s,
a world of privilege and erudition on the
cusp of upheaval, School Days is a novel
of change, loss, and liberation.”
—Jennifer Finney Boylan,
author of She’s Not There and Good BoyOTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM
“Nostalgia, desire,
and the treachery of
long-held secrets collide
in this absorbing psychological mystery set amid
the casual cruelties of privilege and youth.”
—Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning
author of Three Junes and Vigil HarborEmre 35 39 .indd 39 3 / 23 / 22 4 : 55 PM