Dreams of Sleep; A Novel

New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, 1984. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 232 pages. DJ is price clipped. Inscribed For Ben Hutto on the front free endpaper by the author, Josephine Humphreys. This is believe to be THE Ben Hutto, born in Charleston who was an American musician who specialized in writing, producing, and directing choral music. He served as Director of Choral Activities and Director of Performing Arts at St. Albans School, the National Cathedral School for Girls, and was also Director of Music at St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square. (DC). In this book, the effects of place and time past---those overbearing yet preserving forces--are evoked with such high emotion, eloquence, and clear compassion that the literary debut of Josephine Humphreys becomes a cause for gratitude and celebration. When seventeen- year-old Iris Moon, a poor white babysitter, joins the Reese household--Alice, her physician husband Will, and two small daughters--the Reese's seemingly idyllic marriage is drifting toward sadness and dissolution. Humphreys has a wonderful eye for the way people and places change, and Dreams of Sleep is a fine novel, full of insights about modern Southerners. It is both a tough book and a compassionate one--an attractive, not so common combination. She knows the minds and actions of men as thoroughly as women; and she traces both equally in language distinguished for economy, clarity, wit, and the constant wise beauty that's half her news. The effects of place and time past are evoked with such high emotion, eloquence, and clear compassion that the literary debut of Josephine Humphreys becomes a cause for gratitude and celebration. Josephine Humphreys (born February 2, 1945) is an American novelist. This is her first novel. While her first three novels are mainly about contemporary family life in the South, her fourth, Nowhere Else on Earth, is a departure in that it is an historical novel based on the true story of Rhoda Strong and Henry Berry Lowrie from the American Civil War era. It won the Southern Book Award in 2001. Humphreys was the winner of the 1984 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Dreams of Sleep, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lyndhurst Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. A lot of Humphrey's novels have been inspired not only by the landscape of Charleston but also from her own life. Many of her characters represent a personal metaphor. Most books represent a form of family and community because that was important to Humphreys. Most importantly they reflect Charleston and how its changed from when she was a child to now. One book in particular, Fireman's Fair was rewritten in three months because of the hurricane and its significant impact on the landscape. Derived from a Kirkus review: The lives of a chain of unhappy loners in Charleston, South Carolina--flecked with prickly perceptions about the disorientation and loneliness of marriage. Alice is 33, a former math scholar now married to ob/gyn Dr. Will Reese, the mother of two small girls; and though she once had hoped that the "world's rules" might strengthen her timid link to the "real world," every event since Alice's marriage "had turned opaque and medieval. . . and mysterious." Will is having an unjelled affair with his sad receptionist Claire--but Alice's jealousy has turned, oddly, simply to curiosity. Furthermore, Alice's children are afraid of her. And then Will's mother Marcella--who shucked a drab widowhood to marry a destroy-all developer--suggests that Alice hire a part-time babysitter: 17-year-old Iris, who's in the process of triumphantly constructing a life away from her helpless, deserted mother. (She has a job, school, plus the self-structured task of caring for three destitute old men.) All these lives, then, plus a few others, will overlap and influence each other. Alice dreams of the "ease" of sleep, the sweetness of solitude. Will begins to falter in his work, joining an old friend (victim of an agonizing divorce) in symbolically playing out "an old ritual of old men. . . for the sake of what used to be." Alice, Will, and Iris will change their perceptions of themselves, their destinies, and parents living and dead. And finally Iris learns to teach love--while Will and Alice reach the humble recognition that "for us love is not a natural state," but they'll "begin their spin" . . . together. The dank, cloudy depressions of Humphrey's lonely ones are complemented by a quietly sagging and pillaged Charleston; and though the slow-pulse pace is a bit heavy for some of the night flights and slippery voyeurisms that take place, this is a rasping and distinctive first novel.