Slowly creeping through Delillo’s world in White Noise, I felt I was caught up in the midst of an apocalypse where acerbic wit teetered on everyone’s tongue and everyone was comfortably uncomfortable. So close it was to the typical Updike tale of a family enduring crisis independently and as a collective infused with Delillo’s politics and vision of the technologically obsessed society. Television is the collective unconscious, and the family competes to out-wit one another. In the end, I shielded myself with my radioactive blanket and prayed for a simpler world of beanstalks and freesia instead of one where mankind was slowly committing mass suicide.

I had a similar feeling while reading Matthew Sharpe’s The Sleeping Father, however, I will dare to say that Sharpe is more successful than Delillo’s (although incredibly brilliant) work in so far as they novel delivers a quieter message about the crumbling nuclear family without the fanfare and confetti of toxic gas and gas masks. Here, divorced and depressed Bernard Schwartz, unhappily medicated on Prozac, manages to take another anti-depressant which chemically reacts to induce a coma. While he lies in a hospital bed, he is surrounded by his gifted and utterly sad children that need him to sustain. Chris Schwartz is a man that only drinks when he knows he will drive and his younger sister, Cathy, fascinated by the Jewish martyr turned saint, Edith Stein, earnestly cloaks herself with holy water, prayer and ritual in order to unfold her identity and aid in her coping with a mute father, a mother that Cathy caught in a compromising position while she was married to Bernie and a brother that both angers and comforts her. Although Sharpe is merciless in his dialogue between characters, arming them with caustic wit, he undoes them with moments that his characters themselves can only own. Alone in the hospital bed, Chris proceeds to draw a Hitler moustache on his father’s sleeping face and after he’s seen his work, he crumbles and huddles under his father’s bed to be closer to him. After rebuffing Chris’s best friend and fellow embittered partner-in-crime, Frank Dial’s lyric about her moist palms, she is soon drawn closer to Frank and ultimately, they seek to create a new family outside of their withering own. Somewhat oblivious to their own privilege, Sharpe is careful about rendering his characters sympathetic, not sentimental. After donating an inheritance to a battered woman’s shelter, Cathy befriends a victim who consequently robs their home so that her family, too, can start another life.

All the characters, albeit, Dr. Danmeyer, mother Lila Munroe, Moe Danmeyer, Frank Dial seek something other in Sharpe’s brilliantly constructed novel. However, they find that the one thing that remains, that binds them together is Bernie, who after waking from his comma, finds his family completely fallen apart, his ex-wife with another man and is limited by his own capacity to speak and construct words. Again, Sharpe veers away from the over-sentimentality by infusing some of Bernie’s own wit into the most honest narrative in the entire work. Cloaked by his illness, he has been given license to react truthfully and sometimes tactless – this serves to continuously challenge the surrounding characters that ironically enough, are mentally superior. Although he is compromised by his illness, he is not compromised as a fully-realized and endearing character.

There are some truly hysterical moments in a novel that involves a coma, a beating, a divorce, a robbery, pistol-whipping, however they are uplifted by the individual characters unraveling themselves and redefining family in their own particular way. The laughter comes from a real place – one of fear, of love.

The only criticism that I can offer is ironically what I loved most about the tale Sharpe weaves. All of the characters are too finely tuned, everyone knows exactly what to say at any given moment and they are all armed with their own brand of barbs and witticisms. It may have fared more successful (than the novel already is) if a character other than Bernie was somehow calmer, less ready to react for at times, the characters’ dialogue echoed too close to one another. A small note on an otherwise searing portrait.