![]() ![]() There is a stark sense of living death in Robby's account of Herbert's office retirement party. Herbert, the ne'er-do-terribly-well father, seems always to be speaking from the other side of the evening paper, while Liesl and Carol, who moves from husband to husband, have their own ghosts. The suppressed presence of death, as well as repressed emotion, are constant: Robby's parents fled Germany in the 30's, but lost many members of their families in the Holocaust, and their guilt at the memory pervades the novel. The only awkward device in the novel is using Robby's conversations with his analyst as a device to tell us what he is thinking at various points in his life. The author has used his talent as a screenwriter as a tool to craft a first-rate work of fiction. Bergman's nights become more and more sleepless. Indeed, as the story moves from Robby's boyhood to his adulthood, he is really the only one to mature, although the mood progresses from morning to afternoon to twilight as Mr. Bergman's nights are dark indeed - as the novel progresses he graphically explores themes of incest as well as conventional sexual relationships, but never does so luridly or gratuitously.Īs Robby becomes an adult, searching for love and experiencing personal tragedy, the dialogue sheds its flip quality and the characters lose their early stereotyped appearance. Bergman wrote the screenplays for "Blazing Saddles" and "Honeymoon in Vegas" and directed the recent film "It Could Happen to You." But Mr. In theory, the episodic structure, the acid-etched dialogue, the sharply focused action should not be surprising. The action flashes back and forth from the 50's to the 90's the scenes are sharply set and the dialogue crisp and funny, even when the plot borders on the neurotic, the repellent and sometimes the tragic. "Sleepless Nights" concerns itself with the fortunes of Robby Weisglass, from his comic-book-reading adolescence to a moderately successful academic career as a professor of history at Columbia University.Īlso involved are his mother, Liesl, his father, Herbert, a mid-level editor for a stable of trade magazines, and Carol, Robby's sexually precocious older sister, a brassiere model in her teens. $19.95.ĮXACTLY six pages into what begins deceptively as an amusing but unremarkable novel about a New York Jewish family in the second half of this century, Andrew Bergman makes the hair start to rise on the back of a reader's neck. ![]()
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