Sleepwalking

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The trouble with this disconcerting first novel is not so much the premise-that a woman in her eighth month of pregnancy is seduced by a man to whom she proves irresistible-but that all the characters are unappealing, and some are downright revolting. The narrator, Susan, is a would-be artist who married her successful management-consultant husband Alastair despite the fact that she did not love him. She elicits little sympathy from the reader, despite the unhappy circumstances of her life, which she recalls in flashback. Her father, Douglas, who has just committed suicide as the novel opens, was viciously mean and sadistically spiteful, the kind of man whose idea of a good time is to take his three young daughters to see the bodies of the rats he has shot. It's no wonder that he turned out so badly, having been brutally mistreated by his mother, the loathsome Queenie, whose hateful conduct is the stuff of melodrama but not of psychologically grounded behavior. Traumatized by both her progenitors, Susan feels she has been sleepwalking through life. Then, when she begins seeing her father's ghost, she realizes that he actually walked in his sleep as a boy. When Lenny, a talented but indigent artist, tells the very pregnant Susan that he adores her, she hopes the affair will bring an end to her ``deep, heart-gripping desolation.'' But the self-pitying tone of this novel, the lack of credible characterization and the assumption that the reader will feel empathy with the suddenly liberated Susan when she decides she must leave her decent, likable husband, make it thoroughly distasteful. Author tour. (Feb.)

Library Journal

The eighth month of pregnancy proves difficult for Susan. Her remote and unhappy father has committed suicide, and Susan is now haunted by the ghost of him as a boy. Emotionally immature herself, Susan has drifted most of her life, detached from those around her. Shocked out of her detachment by her father's death, Susan begins an affair with a sexually enticing artist while her husband, supportive and loving, does his best to understand a wife who seems interested only in withdrawing from him. Myerson's portrait of the tortured family relationships in this first novel has subtle power; the reader soon feels an overwhelming pity for most of the damaged people portrayed here. All in all, an impressive debut; recommended for most fiction collections.-Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.

Denise Perry Donavin

Susan, a woman who feels that everyone in her life is trying to control her, struggles to feel some sense of self during her last months of pregnancy and her first months of motherhood. Myerson's novel tells of the clashing experiences of motherhood faced by Susan and, decades earlier, by Queenie Sanderson. Eventually, it is revealed that the pair are granddaughter and grandmother. Queenie's mismanagement of her role led to the dismal state Susan finds herself in--haunted by her father, who has recently committed suicide. Her father was a "cruel and pathetic sort of man" but appears as a ghostly, sad little boy. The counterpoint to that haunted sensation is the blossoming of Susan's affair with Lennie, an artist who is as much, or more, in love with Susan's physical state and her new baby as with her. An impressionable, sentient first novel.