Family weekend provided the ideal situation for Assistant Professor of English Matthew Sharpe to read from his new novel about a father and his son entitled “The Sleeping Father.”
Friday’s event was meant to give families a taste of the creative writing opportunities at Wesleyan, so Sharpe prefaced his reading with a few thoughts on the merits of studying fiction and writing in college.
“I certainly don’t expect all my students to go on to be writers, but one of the things that you’re figuring out in college is: what do I want my life to be?” he said. “And I think if you happen to be someone for whom literature and story telling and poetry are going to be an important part of your life…[studying writing] gives you a deeper appreciation of what it means to be involved in literature.”
Sharpe proceeded to read the first selection of what Publisher’s Weekly calls his “tragic and madcap” novel about a father who falls into a coma after accidentally mixing incompatible anti-depressants. The Russell House audience filled every seat and even crowded the door and hallways, rapt during the whole of Sharpe’s narration.
Sharpe read a total of three selections from his novel, each about twenty minutes in length. The first introduced the protagonists, Bernard Schwartz and his son Chris, two confused but loving characters living in a small suburb in Connecticut. In the second selection, Bernard lies unconscious in a hospital bed after falling into the coma, while Chris tenderly draws on his face with magic marker. The third selection comes after Bernard awakes from the coma, brain-damaged. Chris takes time off from high school to help reintroduce his father to reality.
Sharpe read his passages slowly and deliberately, doing justice both to the comedic and to the tender moments. The novel combines the dry wit of a David Sedaris story with the symbolism of the modernists. It is both a story of the simple love between a father and son and a commentary on American life, pharmaceutical obsessions and all.
“If you were to read just the first passage you might mistake me for a realist,” Sharpe said during the question-and-answer session after the reading, “but I combine writing styles…so certain passages have a realist texture and other passages have a more symbolic texture. I think it’s possible for these [styles] to rub up against each other within the same text.”
The novel took Sharpe two and a half years to write with, as he said, about four or five different attempts at starting it.
“I make a list of things I want to have happen in the next 50 pages, and sometimes I follow it and sometimes I don’t,” Sharpe said after being asked about his writing process.
“Make a regular appointment with the paper,” he added, “because if you wait around for inspiration, the paper may well have turned to dust.”
Sharpe admitted that “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, which he was reading as he wrote the novel, was a primary influence over his work.
“Her use of point of view…became a model for the point of view that I use in this book, which is third-person point of view where at times you are very close to the characters, almost at one with their consciousness, and at other times quite distant from them,” he said.
Sharpe repeatedly told his students in the audience to “do as I say, not as I do.”
He currently teaches the Advanced Fiction Workshop and Techniques of Fiction. Next semester he will teach the Intermediate Fiction Workshop and “The Uses of Fantasy: Reading 20th Century Fiction from a Writer’s Perspective.”
Sarah Suzuki ’07 is in his Techniques of Fiction class and had glowing things to say about Sharpe as a professor.
“[His class is] really engaging without being intimidating,” Suzuki said. “He’s really good at challenging us while making us feel like we can say what we’re thinking.”
This is Sharpe’s first year as a professor at the University. His reading and the short reception that followed provided a delightful way for parents to learn about the writing program at Wesleyan.
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