A Very Writerly First Novel Set in 19th-century France: "Madeleine is Sleeping" by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

The 2004 National Book Award for fiction nominations from a committee headed by Rock Moody - Florida by Christine Shut, madeleine is sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck, Our Kind by Kate Walbert and Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber -, in a year when Philip Roth, Russell Banks, Chang-Rae Lee, and Cynthia Ozick published novels was denounced as a feast of canapés by Caryn James in the New York Times and by many for being a list entirely composed of New York women with a short story ethic. Only one, Kate Walbert's Our Kind, had sold more than 2,000 copies of her book when the nominations were announced, according to Nielsen BookScan figures.

When I got around to reading the winner, Tuck's The News From Paraguay, I thought that most of the criticisms of the lot did not apply. She may live in New York, but Tuck lived much of her life elsewhere and there is no sense in which The News From Paraguay is a New York novel. It really is a novel encompassing a swathe of history. The vignettes are not self-contained and have a definite narrative arc (of rise and fall). 19^th-century Paraguay may be obscure, even exotic, but it is not contemporary New York.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, who was born in Houston and now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, San Diego and is the author more recently of the acclaimed Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award (losing to Joseph O'Neill's cricket novel Netherland), was nominated for her surrealistic first novel, madeleine is sleeping. None of its chapters runs more than two pages. A number of them are only one line. With strong images, many are prose poems, not the plainspoken short story ethic (even if Bynum regularly publishes in the New Yorker...).

madeleine is sleeping (the non-capitalization of the title on the cover and title page is overriden by AC title editing) is very high-concept. If not quite hyperficiton, it is as much that as anything by Italo Calvino, the pre-computer-text ancestor of hyperfiction. There seem to be two stories. The titular Madeleine and other girls in the nineteenth-century French countryside had been masturbating a local halfwit, Monsieur Jouy. Madeleine was fascinated by the physics/physiology of erection and ejaculation. The other girls found it repulsive, but pocketed the small change he gave them.

To punish her, Madeleine's mother plunges her daughter's hands in lye, so that she can never again grasp anything-or does she? The chapter that reports this is titled she dreams. Madeleine does not awaken, even when a would-be Prince Charming kisses her.

Madeleine's mothers fruit preserve business prospers at first, but as the mother becomes irritated at having to work around her comatose daughter and regularly bruises her with "accidental" whacks, her business declines.

Meanwhile Madeleine dreams about running away (from the convent of Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline books) and falling in love with The Flatulent Man. After the novelty of his act fades, he is confined to an insane asylum, from which Madeleine rescues him. Alternatively (in the realer world, which may be another of Madeleine's dream worlds...) her mother rescues M. Jouy to make an honest woman of Madeleine.

The world of Madeleine's dreams is more eventful and has more colorful characters (though none lack in pathos), but I found it impossible to care about any of the characters in either narrative line. I tired of the succession of images, too many of which seem culled from The Madwoman in the Attic. If there had not been so much white space, I would not have made it through the book.

In anointing one of their own (regular contributors) as one of the 20 fiction writers under the age of 40 to watch, the New Yorker probably boosted Bynum's sales. (The current issue of the magazine also has a story, "The Erlking" (after Goethe) by her. (Without the title, I would not have known that the gift-giver who intrigues a girl in the story is malevolent; he is not elf-sized.) I looked at the Amazon sales rankings of the five 2004 NBA nominees. I found that all can be purchased used for one cent plus shipping/handling. Madeleine is sleeping had the highest sales rank at 187-some thousand, followed by Florida (233), The News From Paraguay (356), Our Kind (363), and Ideas of Heaven (661)

BTW, madeleine is sleeping won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize or fiction by an American woman.