Dreams of Sleep

by Josephine Humphreys

Alice Reese knows that the cheerful sounds of her family eating breakfast mask a ten--year marriage falling apart. As Alice and her husband, Will, struggle to understand--and perhaps recapture--the feelings that drew them together in the first place, their interior lives are sensitively and convincingly explored.

Genres: Fiction, Southern, Novels, Literature, Contemporary

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1984

About the author

Josephine Humphreys is an American novelist. She won the 1984 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Dreams of Sleep and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lyndhurst Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Nowhere Else on Earth won the Southern Book Award in 2001

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable, well written. Love the depiction of Charleston. These characters are pretty depressing. But it is beautiful too how they struggle.

Best dynamic is that between the two doctors. More real than real.

Wish Emory had been a little more fleshed out. He's almost saintly in comparison to everyone else. But that makes him almost bland or flimsy.

All in all, a very good read.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was extraordinary when I read it in 1985. Recently, I pulled it from my add-to-GoodReads shelf. (Six other books in this category sit on my desk, plus a fairly long list of others. They mean too much to me to toss off in a quick review.) I was facing some fairly insipid fiction and got drawn into rereading this, instead of new books from the library. And, Dreams of Sleep holds up beautifully. I probably appreciate it more now that I've been married almost 30 years. It's the portrait of a marriage on auto-pilot, and seven years into my own marriage I might have had a clue, but not much of one. Now I have perspective, and it makes all the difference. Josephine Humphreys writes beautifully, as the many underlined passages and Post-It flags attest:
"This marriage is like a place where the language is not her native tongue. She has managed to pick up the words and idioms and intonations gradually, so that now they sound almost right coming out of her mouth, but she knows they are his."
"You have to feel sorry for anyone in whom love grows so big it edges our the feelings of normal life, including hunger."
"It dawned on him that the loneliness of marriage, the thing Alice had so feared, starts out of the love itself, which can never deliver on its promises."
"But we are not joined. We only touch, Alice thinks."
"The difference between love and no love is slight, anyway. People are fooled every day about whether they have it or not."
"The web of love and anger is so dense between mother and child, it is never clear what thread is laid down first: the child's cry or the mother's sympathetic caress; the mother's anger or the child's misbehavior and remorse."
"It isn't that nothing is left. It is that what remains is such an old sad ghost of the thing that used to be, and he can't bear lying down with the vestiges."
There are only one or two other Southern women writers who can hold a candle to Josephine Humphreys. I can't wait to reread them!

[Jim Grimsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the second Josephine Humphreys book I read and the first that she wrote; this is sparely beautiful in tone and the prose flows so simply and cleanly. The novel has a deeply meditative quality and also has the freshness of a first book, tooled and polished and refined. Even when I have read all of a writer's work, as I have with Humphreys, I usually have a special fondness for the first book, and that remains true in this case. The plot is among the simplest to describe, the travails of a marriage that has lost its glow, the fear of infidelity, the fear of loss; a book you've read a thousand times, and yet in Humphreys' hands it becomes effortlessly fresh and new. We remember that each marriage succeeds or fails in the specific terms of the people who are in it, and further, that the magic of a normal life, the struggles of the kind of people we see everyday, are anything but ordinary. This book will always have a special place on my shelf.

[Laura McGregor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book which I could pick up and re-read. It helps that the author is from my hometown

[Mathilde · Rating 4 out of 5]

You’re not supposed to count the failures, though, when you hope. It’s like tossing coins. For a given toss, the chance is even, unlinked to history.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm filling in my PEN/Hemingway gaps with this one. Humphreys does have some talent. There's one extremely vivid scene of a miscarriage that is one of the most original depictions of such a horrific calamity that I've ever read. There's also some semi-decent atmospheric details of South Carolina and early 1980s life, which suggests that Humphreys is interested in investigating the violence and the treachery of human behavior beneath the sunny Reagan aura. Unfortunately, Humphreys pulls her punches too often, particularly in scenes she sets up in which she really wants to go for the jugular of truth. So what SHOULD be original becomes a fairly hackneyed portrayal of obvious marital problems, adultery, and other domestic foibles. So this novel is a deeply frustrating read. Honestly, you'd be far better ditching this one entirely and picking up Gail Godwin's neglected masterpiece A MOTHER AND TWO DAUGHTERS, which covers this sort of subject matter with a less diffident literary touch and far more insight and confidence.

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book, its language and metaphors and style very poetic without arty self-consciousness. The imagery and character inner and outer dialogue simply flow, naturally as a swift body of water. I have to laugh at people not liking the characters. I suppose they are too real and thus flawed, not living up to ideals of some sort. For one thing, though all these characters are so flawed, they are all also very generous, very alive and sentient and capable of love. And though Humphrey's loves her characters, she never makes the mistake of protecting them or dips them in fake sentimental sap. Few books are worthy of a sequel, but this one would have been (I don't know if there was one; it was written so long ago.) I will certainly read more by Josephine Humphreys. She is an American treasure.

[Jeanette · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it was my mood or the type of book just wasn't my thing, but I was bored and it was depressing so I stopped at page 167. Not for me.

[Lee Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was good enough for me to stick with it all the way through. Three main characters - Iris, Will & Alice. Much of the book delves into their inner thoughts and insecurities which for Alice & Will seem extremely selfish and self-centered. I know that it's possible for married people to almost completely not know each other and for people in general to be completely unsure of their reason for being, but for Alice and Will, it almost seems like a ridiculous amount of navel-gazing. All of their issues both real and in their heads seem to scream of 1st world problems and privilege. Most people are too busy working and raising families to be as self-focused as these two. Iris, on the other hand, is a delight. A tenacious teenager from the projects whose entire life has been about taking care of others and abandonment - both by her father who comes in and out of their lives, and her mother who is emotionally dependent on Iris. If you ever read my reviews, you know that I end the more critical ones with a "maybe it's me." Maybe it's me, but at this stage of my life, I have a tough time sympathizing with self-absorbed character. This book is not on par with my favorite Humphrey's books, Rich in Love & Nowhere Else on Earth. One last comment - I will read anything that takes place in the Charleston area. One thing I always look for is accuracy of the setting, if it is a real place that I'm familiar with. I could imagine myself walking from Will & Alice's to Iris' house or her mom's place in the projects. I could get from Will's to his mother's on The Battery. I give Ms. Humphrey's kudos for this - not every author gets it right. When you say that someone could walk out their front door and turn right to get to XX street, it's important that it's accurate!!

[Alex Wexelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I'd die before I finished this one. Its soured marriage plot made me reluctant to answer the clarion call of "read me." Put another way: This book was a bummer and that made me reluctant to pick it up. Nothing too serious happens in the book, though it could pass for a melodrama, and while it is written with confidence it stammers here and there in a way that pulls you out of it. Alice and Will are college sweethearts. Will has a best friend, Danny, who, like him, is a doctor. Alice's and Will's marriage is unraveling over an affair, and separately, their individual lives are melting down. Alice has her two daughters who hate her. Then there's Will and Claire—Will's secretary / lover—who are falling out and Will and Danny whose friendship is imploding. Plus, we've got this side plot about the babysitter, which is handled with a lot of care, but ultimately is filled with tropes and is overall unnecessary. The ending fumbles it. Too neat. Everything in this book sort of lines up in a way that feels forced and hackneyed. I still think it was a cool book that aspired to a lot and gets 85 percent of the way there. But ultimately doesn't make it. I'm not mad I read it, but I won't recall its details in about six months time.

[Samantha Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I finally finished it. I enjoyed the authors writing style, it had the perfect balance of flowery details without getting lost in the weeds. The story is a little depressing, but that’s what I was looking for at the time –something sort of relatable. There’s something I find enjoyable about mundane life and this book checked that box. I do wish Alice had grown to love herself a little more than she did. Overall, I’m glad I read the book and I can appreciate it.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at a 10 year marriage that is experiencing difficulties. Written against the background of Charleston, there are things to keep the book moving when the characters aren't busy. Not as dynamic as Rich In Love, but Josephine Humphreys writing to enjoy. Southern Contemporary Fiction.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Josephine Humphreys’ writing style is beautiful but this book just wasn’t very interesting. I feel bad about giving it only 2 stars but I could barely finish it. There wasn’t even a buildup to the end.

[Pattie O'Donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous.

[Chel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hemingway Prize winner.
Will is having an affair to stave off boredom. Alice is in a suffocating embrace of inertia and depsondency. Iris Moon comes to the babysit the Reece' children.

Each character is well explored complete with their interactivity with other characters. Narrative very strong, reminiscent of Tyler. Heroine similar to Rebecca in 'Back When We Were Grownups'. Alice and husband have become estranged.

Enjoyed this book, especially the narrative, but the storyline was depressing. I did not endear myself to any one character.

[Stephanie Burt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book taught me a lot about writing. I didn't like the characters, no sympathy, so I was reading for reading's sake, and it crept up behind me. I think this author gets behind Charleston's facade, shows depth and the description of the neighborhoods in this book were right on.

[Mary D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a book group and was much better than I expected. I had not heard of the author before this. It is well written and has a lot of emotional insight. The relationships were very real.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written fiction about the south. Could have done without some of the chapters. Actually I skipped over several of them.

[Shelly]

Very easy to read. I enjoyed getting to know the characters and following their journey. It was a very well written book.