THE HOUSE OF SLEEP

THE HOUSE OF SLEEP
Jonathan Coe
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
331 pages, hardback, $24.00
ISBN 0-375-40093-I

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

Ashdown, a 100-year-old mansion perched at the edge of a cliff overlooking the English coast, serves as a dormitory for two dozen university students, in this second novel by prize winning British author Jonathan Coe. The students include Sarah, a woman troubled by unexpected sleep attacks and hallucinations she confuses with reality; Gregory, Sarah's inept and sadistic lover, who is soon to enter medical school; Robert, who pines with unrequited love for Sarah; and Terry, Robert's and Sarah's friend, a film fanatic who sleeps 14 hours a day.

Twelve years later, Ashdown houses a sleep clinic run by Gregory, now an inept and sadistic psychiatrist. Terry, now a film critic who does not sleep at all, agrees to let Gregory study him in the sleep lab. Sarah's narcolepsy interferes with her work as a schoolteacher. Telling Robert's fate would spoil the story, but he, too, shows up at Ashdown. The story segues between past and present.

The arrogant Gregory tells Terry, "I'm the only one working in this field who sees sleep for what it really is." It's a disease, he asserts. "If you spend eight hours a day in bed," he says, "then sleep is shortening your life by a third!" Gregory conducts sleep deprivation experiments--actually, torture--in secret rooms in the basement. According to his warped logic, if he keeps animals and people from sleeping, he will be able to discover the "cure" for sleep, so that we all can go without it. A student participating in a study dies--not in the lab, but right after leaving it. An investigation threatens Gregory's precarious mental state.

Only one person at Ashdown really sees sleep as it is: the sleep lab technologist. Even she neglects to mention that a seeming somniloquy containing a message critical to the book's action comes from a mysterious self-referred patient who was only pretending to sleep. One improbable coincidence barrels into another to more or less wrap up the tale.

The book explores the intertwining of night and day, dreams and daily life. The sleep savvy reader will encounter a mishmash of sleep information. The ordinary reader won't be able to tell fact from fiction. Members of the sleep community may grind their teeth. They'll sleep better if they view the book as satire: technology gone wild, sleep researcher as mad scientist. The author paints other contemporary topics with an equally broad brush: managed care, marketing seminars for physicians, sexual identity crises, breaches of psychiatric confidentiality.

The writing is strong, and the interrelated stories are complex enough to keep readers from dozing. Would-be novelists in the sleep community and others who deal with public perceptions of sleep and sleep disorders may find it interesting to see how sleep science can be exploited for fictional purposes.