Kevin Prufer
Sleepaway
Acre Books / April 2024 / 187 pp / $20
Reviewed by Lisa McCormack / August 2024
When a renowned poet turns his hand to novel writing, we expect the work to be, well, poetic, with lyrical phrases and metaphors. In his debut novel, Sleepaway, Kevin Prufer brings beautiful language and poetic tension to the page, along with a tight, dystopic plot and originally drawn characters. Sleepaway is also a page turner. There are mysterious deaths, a stolen gun, a search for drugs, and a possibly looming apocalypse.
But, like a long poem, there is densely metaphoric language, startling imagery, and lyric phrasing that, for some, will bring back memories of those strange, isolating Covid years. This is a novel where abandoned cats slip across the street as “quickly and silently as passing thoughts.” It is a novel in which a colony of black wasps serves as a metaphor for the events of the story, with wasps that “bumped stupidly into the screen ceiling,” like “sad, lost men.” It is a book about survival, and learning what matters most.
Prufer, award winning author of The Fears and other poetry books, and professor of English and director of the creative writing program at University of Houston, has given us a tender, thoughtful, and descriptive story about a handful of people trying to survive a pandemic. He explores an array of themes, including racism, sins of the past, privacy, and the importance of literature.
It is 1984. Across the world, mists “fine as pollen” are falling from the sky, causing people to slip into a deep sleep for two minutes, two hours, or forever. Prufer uses poetic language to describe the sleeps as dreamy, yet something to be feared.
It was the strongest sleep she had ever felt. Such twinkling in the corners of her eyes, the twinkling closing in, like fireflies hovering over a black field, glittering, the fireflies rising and falling, and behind them just darkness, just blackness and sleep sleep sleep.
Deep sleeps are referred to as the “Sinaloan Condition,” since a theory is put forth that the mist was grown in a Sinaloan lab by Russian scientists. Sinaloa is the Mexican home to the Sinaloan Cartel. Prufer makes interesting use of the word “Sinaloan,” which sounds like “sin alone.” Did sin alone cause the mists to fall? Are deep sleepers alone with their sins? Prufer leaves it to the reader to decide.
In small-town Missouri, the sleeps are becoming longer and more frequent, announced by alarms “scrolling up the television’s blue atmosphere, fizzing through the radio’s gray half-static.” The primary character, nicknamed Glass, is a typical middle-school boy living on his own. His guardians, first his father and then a family friend Glass calls his “temporary father,” have fallen victim to the deep sleep. When a young woman saves Glass’ friend from drowning, Glass becomes fixated on her. Cora, a waitress and playwright longing for family, begins to think of Glass as her son and takes him under her wing.
We explore the lives of Glass, Cora, and other characters through the view of a third- person omniscient narrator who sometimes steps in to address the reader directly. This literary technique of breaking the fourth wall is sometimes tricky, because it interrupts the flow of the narrative. But Prufer pulls it off beautifully and much to his advantage at the end of the novel. He doesn’t interrupt often and quickly gets back to the narrative. For example, early in the novel the author explains why he’s chosen to give information to the reader sooner rather than later.
Anyway, I’m telling you this story now because later on, when things get much worse, you will understand why Glass came to seek her out. Not because he knew her, but because he had decided to notice her, too.
At the beginning of the novel, Prufer introduces an interesting racial disparity: the deep sleep rarely comes to people of color. Those most susceptible are white people of European descent, such as Glass and Cora. The sins of their fathers, perhaps? The author doesn’t specifically say the mists are happening because of sins of the past, but he suggests it.
Glass has also heard that the mist began as either a pollen that floated on warm winds across the globe or from spores that rose from chemically damaged earth, that “every little spore was a sin and the mists were therefore all our sins’ visitation upon us. The mists were justice and punishment and retribution and a kind of cleansing. All at once.”
Whatever the cause of the mists, Prufer has painted an endearing picture of friendship between Glass and his best friend, Scooby, who is Black, and thus not affected by the phenomenon. The 1984 setting allows for some nostalgia of the time, with boom boxes instead of iPhones, and children reading books instead of surfing the internet.
Glass and Scooby also talk about The Microvac Chronicles, a series of books they are reading about a giant computer threatening the world, perhaps a reference to Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question.” Though Sleepaway takes place decades before the world of super computers or the digital surveillance culture, Prufer brilliantly brings those concerns to the novel through Glass’s connection to Asimov’s computer.
Reading helps Glass forget the problems of the mists. But Cora, once a budding playwright, and lover of great literature, including the poems of T.S. Eliot, finds she can barely read or write at all anymore. Perhaps the author is recalling a time during Covid when many of us had trouble focusing on serious literature. At one point, thinking on the horror of the mists, Cora recalls a line from the poem, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” The poem is about inertia and lost opportunities, which Cora is experiencing, and she realizes she believes that literature is now “meaningless dust” that she could never rediscover. To her dismay, she now reads trashy horror novels.
Will literature always be “meaningless dust” for Cora? Or will she renew her passion for playwriting and poetry? Did some of us, during Covid, lose our ability to focus on literature? Did we find our way back? Did we wonder about lost opportunity? About death? About mankind? Sleepaway will give readers a lot to think about after turning the last page of this slim work of art. But isn’t that what we expect, what we yearn to experience, when an award-winning poet gives us a novel?
Lisa McCormack is an alum of the Naslund -Mann MFA program at Spalding University, and a novelist and short story writer from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Her short work has been published in Swing, 3rd Wednesday, and Still: The Journal.
Comments