Sleepwalking, Meg Wolitzer

After Belzhar, I didn’t think I would pick up another Meg Wolitzer novel again, but the premise of Sleepwalking interested me enough that I thought I would chance it. Her debut novel, Sleepwalking encompasses nuggets of wisdom and insight and questions the genuine and artifice of being a person. How many of us can say we are true versions of ourselves without pause and without feeling a tugging sensation in our bellies?

Wolitzer pointedly addresses these existential questions. It’s easier to tell a story that distinguishes the truths from the lies and leaves nothing for our imagination. In several instances, Sleepwalking is about finding out what is real amid the lies. It suggests to a certain extent how conformity is necessary to form connections with people; when we find common ground, we form friendships but in the process, we may assume appearances and characteristics different from our own. Sleepwalking makes a difficult case: how much of ourselves is affected by outside influences? Then what do you do when you realize this, when you’ve snapped out of your sleepwalking state? Do you go back to sleep, pretend like nothing’s changed, and hope for the better, or do you do something, and, if so, what?

Claire emulates the fictional, deceased poet Lucy Asher, Wolitzer’s hybrid creation spawned from Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Claire not only dresses and looks like the late Lucy Asher, but she seems to adopt the poet’s mentality. Claire characterizes the observant narrator who’s too stuck in her head. When she begins a relationship with Julian, it’s not about just being a “death girl” anymore. She has interests outside of her devotion and study of Lucy Asher, which is a problem. Claire resorts to a drastic solution that takes her to the Asher’s home, where Lucy Asher’s parents still reside and mourn their daughter.

When reading about Claire Danzinger, I knew her. I knew her waspy, estranged family, her short list of intellectual, close-knit circle of night owl friends that stayed up till dawn reciting from lyrical lines from their favorite poets, and the boyfriend, awkward and fumbling, a good guy who treats his girlfriend like an epitaph and tries to understand her morbid fascination with suicidal, dead poets. She and her friends are known on campus as the “death girls,” but really, anyone who has been enthralled with a poet’s work and life finds themselves identifying with not only his or her work but the author’s life. The author’s work resonates with you, describes what you couldn’t.  This novel offers the collective examination of the characters’ lives and the influence of people’s presences. Devoted, hard-core, literary lovers will love this novel.

It’s interesting reading how Lucy’s mom interacts with Claire, who turns into an eggshell despite sleeping in Lucy’s room and wearing her beloved poet’s clothing. Claire’s responses are muted by the presence of the parents, her treatment of Lucy’s belonging taciturn yet cognate. So rarely do we meet the people we admire, and when we do: let’s face it, we lose our composure and turn into those annoying fans we promised we’d never be. Claire’s reaction separates her from being just an obsessed admirer, although none of Claire’s behavior could be considered normal. But then again, books with well-adjusted teens/adults bore me, and, not to mention, are too perfect.

It’s as if Claire were Lucy with amnesia. Their persons overlap the other. I can’t tell if this is who Claire is, if she has always been similar to Lucy, or if Claire adopted Lucy’s persona when happening across her work; however, the novel, gives the impression of the former. I wonder though.

As Claire peruses Lucy’s belonging, we know just as much as Claire knows that there’s no finding or learning some awesome truth to explain everything about who Lucy was. Scavenge her biographies, journals, letters, but there is never Lucy Asher. The poet’s death encapsulates her and creates a kind of mythos, found posthumously in the legacy of Sexton and Plath. The mythos surrounding Lucy Asher exaggerates and obscures her person. Her work and life enshrines Asher and keeps her readers and admirers at a distance. The effect of this stretches even to Asher’s parents, who endure a different type of mourning as they must contend with their daughter’s legacy, the media, and a legion of Asher worshipers.

Wolitzer’s novel is smart and exemplifies rhetoric and maturing prose. Several times I stopped to absorb the content and sound of her lines. When learning that Wolitzer wrote the piece during her undergraduate career, it brings to mind the image of a young woman with an insatiable and venereal fascination with literature and its predecessors, which nearly made Sleepwalking a meta-fiction reading experience.

With all of that said, Sleepwalking is sadly not for everyone. It falls into a particular but equivocal true literary genre. It analyzes human isolation, relationships, loss, and as mentioned earlier, identity. Wolitzer even notes in her introduction that she wrote the novel with no targeted audience in mind. It will especially appeal to avid readers of the classics, or people who harbor esoteric obsessions with literary writers.

Rating: 4.4 out of 5

Belzhar

Released in September of 2014, Meg Wolitzer’s novel Belzhar snatched my attention for its plot and author of interest: misfit teenagers mysteriously enrolled in a special topics English course dedicated to the study of Sylvia Plath, her poetry, and her only novel, The Bell Jar. I have a special interest in these novels whether they are fictional or not. There’s something about them that just makes me gravitate toward them that I haven’t been able to figure out why. The piqued interest of a person and their fascination with an author’s work remains my favorite subject to read, even more so when the author’s work is ubiquitously consuming that person’s thoughts.

Belzhar appealed to me because it seemed like it was going to be one of these books, and it’s not as though this subject matter is new terrain for Wolizter. In her debut novel Sleepwalking, Wolitzer tells the story of a young woman in college obsessed with the recently deceased poet, Lucy Ascher, a fictional poet in real life for those about to Google her. The prose mediates the depth of melancholy, alienation, and social aversion respectively without belying the experience. It’s too bad Belzhar does not do the same. To an extent, the world of Belzhar is nothing new to us. We commonly look for ways to escape when the real world is overwhelming and unbearable. Wolitzer tries to piggyback on the symbols and metaphors found in Plath’s The Bell Jar, but Belzhar has little to do with Sylvia Plath, her poems, or Plath’s novel, thus, losing some of the nuance.

After the death of her British boyfriend, Jam is sent to Vermont to a school known as the Wooden Barn, which is a special, therapeutic school designed to help young adults struggling with trauma and/or mental illness. Jam discovers she has been enrolled in an English Special topics class, a class that selectively chooses only a handful of students to enroll. When Jam arrives in class, the teacher, Mrs. Quenell, informs them that they will be studying Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and she provides each of the students with red, leather bound journals to write in throughout the semester. Mrs. Quenell asks that each of the students write in them, adding she will not read them when they submit them at the end of the semester. None of them are thrilled with this idea; however, when Jam opens her journal and starts to write, something happens, and she’s suddenly transported into a world where her British boyfriend is alive [and horny apparently.] The other students experience a similar effect, and they start to learn that these journals are imbued with a special magic that allows them to revisit events prior to what triggered/caused their traumatic episode, dubbing this special world, Belzhar. The only catch? What happens when they fill up the journal? What happens then?

The supernatural element of the story influences the plot’s trajectory by focusing on the tragic past of the characters, literally having them replay the events that transpired. The enigma of Belzhar, although playful and absorbing, consumes most of the novel’s scope. Unsurprisingly the characters would rather live in the past and be lost in a knowing and expectant world because they can find solace and relief there; they can be with their loved ones, have the use of their legs, be somewhere easier. They aren’t damaged goods in Belzhar. I do have a hard time believing that their damaged though. A chapter, or sometimes a passage, reveals the extent of each person’s trauma. The problem I find is that these issues, the internal conflicts of the characters, seem to take care of themselves as if this is a natural progression; no work necessary. The extent of their psychological damage is unconvincing, making for an inchoate story.

The characters come off as banal and too literal. The protagonist, Jam, is both depressed and embarrassed that her reason for landing in this school is because of a boy. Wolitzer fully acknowledges Jam’s position being one of the most typical girl/boy conventions. Jam admits how stupid it is to be grieving over her dead boyfriend that she only knew for a short while. This is suppose to make it better. I can give Wolitzer some lenity but not completely, not when we read Jam spending a majority of her time with her dead boyfriend and then with her new boyfriend. I scoffed.

Although Jam is finding her place in the real world, essentially moving on, it’s hard to determine what triggered this radical transformation. Her other classmates in special topics are the same way. Once Belzhar comes to a close, they are well-composed and accepting of the situation. It’s not only unbelievable but delusional. If nothing else, the writing of these characters greatly belittles the long term effects of trauma and curtails the recovery process.

Belzhar is without meat; the writing is nearly skeletal and is supplemented with easier, terse prose that is inferior to Wolitzer’s previous works. In many ways, the story’s content feels airy and cushioned, a bemusement to anyone who’s read The Bell Jar and/or who’s experienced tragedy or severe, emotional pain. Wolitzer, as I stated earlier, has a prolific and poetic writing style, but in Belzhar, it’s nonexistent. The writing presently is adequate, represented in how the characters are written, how the school is written, and how the story “nicely” concludes.

When I say “nicely, ”everyone has a happy ending. It wasn’t that this happy ending was out of reach; it’s an inarguable ending. With the exception of Jam’s story, which was by far the most interesting twist and was actually my favorite part of the novel, there’s a difference in having closure and finding closure: having comes after finding it. I don’t think that’s complicated. Wolitzer has reversed it, however. She has made self-love and acceptance easy.

I’m not against having a happy ending, even if some of my previous reviews suggest that I am. I want some of these characters to find closure. I do. The problem I find with Belzhar is how it suggests that the world is suddenly different when you are different, as if there’s a symbiotic relationship, that your change affects the world. But the world hasn’t changed, only your perception of it, and staying happy on a bad day is tricky.

The characters relived their glorious moments and their worst moments. But then what? Families are still irreparable and farm animals still dead. One character will never walk again. Certainly these characters can overcome them but not easily and not by reliving and escaping to those moments stored in our heads. Belzhar is a band-aid; real closure is found and is an ongoing process, whether you’re a young adult, in your 30s, or sixty five years old.

Rating: 3 out of 5