First Person, Interruptive

“The invisible mists were falling, fine as pollen, and soon everyone would sleep.”

Thus opens Sleepaway, poet Kevin Prufer’s debut novel, published earlier this year. Set in 1984, with the dystopian intimation Orwell breathed into that calendar number, Sleepaway is—yes—a kind of dystopia, quietly disturbing, a coming-of-age story as only a gifted poet could bring to the page.

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A pandemic of sorts has arrived—the mists of Prufer’s opening sentence—erratic, haphazard clouds that wrap all inside them in sleep. Most wake when the mists pass; some do not. Our protagonist is a boy called Glass, whose father has succumbed to indefinite sleep.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Glass had once been a normal boy who spent an abnormal  amount of time sitting in the middle school hallway because  he could not hold still. He just couldn’t. Every inch of his  body craved movement when he was at school.

This boy inhabits the realm of the best adolescent fiction, smoothly written, with much going on beneath the surface. Living with a “temporary father,” Glass negotiates school days and time with two friends, parsing what he can about the mysterious sleeps from overheard conversations among the adults in his life.

Most sleepers wake to report complete, dreamless cessation. Not Glass. His sleeps are vivid with dreams. Eleven pages in, Prufer reports on one such dream, the scene so vividly depicted I forgot Glass was dreaming:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  . . . a desolate town, an overgrown little park near the town hall,  the sky streaked with gray, a late-afternoon light, a feeling of May  in the air. It threatened to rain but it would not, and Glass and  Glass’s father and perhaps a hundred others were settling into  folding chairs spread out on the grass, because the show was  about to begin.

And then this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I was there with them, sitting just a row behind Glass and his  father, and when Glass glanced at me, I quickly looked down  at my program.

The first-person I here stops my reading cold. What is the narrator—Kevin Prufer, I assume—doing inside the novel, inside a scene in Glass’ life? Then I backtrack a paragraph and . . . I laugh. The author-narrator has just appeared in his protagonist’s dream!

I had no idea what Prufer was up to here. But I admire an author who bends the rules, who writes the unexpected, who breaks the fourth wall, speaking from the pages of fiction. I thought surely the I would appear again, and I was not disappointed. It’s a rare appearance, not often enough to break the spell of the narrative. But periodically the I speaks again—tickling an observant reader’s curiosity.

I don’t want to spoil this surprise by telling you why I think Prufer inserts himself into a fictional narrative that doesn’t include him as a character (or does it?). I do want to encourage you to read Sleepaway. And to make yourself ready for surprise, no matter what you choose to read

Notes:

Recipient of five Pushcart prizes and several Best American Poetry selections, Kevin Prufer is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Fears.

Sleepaway is available here ⇒

The Fears—highly recommended—is available here ⇒

PSA: Please purchase your books from independent bookstores or small presses or online entities such as bookshop.org. Avoid the Big-A, which is in the business of putting independent bookstores and small presses out of business.

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