Enter, Sleeping

by David Karp, Edward Sorel (Illustrator)

From "... A fast, fun, farcical frolic with a nice blend of Sixties innocence and Cold War paranoia." Also published as "The Sleepwalkers."

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

David Karp was an American novelist and television writer. He also used the pseudonyms Wallace Ware and Adam Singer.

Reviews

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never heard of this or its author till I saw a tatty old Penguin copy in a charity shop and gave it a go. It's a jolly old bit of satire from New York in the 50s, somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. Young Julius Shapiro is a good jewish boy who lives with his mum and has a humdrum office job for a flaky theatre producer, whilst dreaming of being a songwriter. He gets mixed up with a mixed-up girlfriend and her weirdo intellectual dad and the crank society of "The Truth Seekers", which leads to public disorder, secret service surveillance, and all kinds of baloney. There's some observational detail about anti-semitism in here as well as a few good laughs. Maybe the Coen brothers could film it, but they've sort-of already gone over this ground already, most recently in "Hail Caesar".

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Karp's penultimate novel is a minor effort, aiming more at overt satire than at the psychodrama at the hearts of most of his books. This one is about a young play-reader for a New York production company who falls in with a tiny group of "truth seekers," whose goals seem to be puncturing the hypocrisy and facile culture of modern life. The humor manages to waver between subtle and heavy-handed and ultimately the story is as fragile as the ancient Avon edition I read -- which literally began to crumble in my hands near the end of the book. Perhaps most interesting is that this is the first of karp's works to feel like a product of the "new" hip culture of the late 50s and early 60s. The main female character would be at home in an early Terry Southern work. Given that Karp by this point in his career was making a good living as a TV writer, it's easy to imagine this as a rewritten script he couldn't sell.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult to say what this is about. A Jewish boy in his 20s, living at home with his typical Jewish mother and his relationship with a shiksa. A 1960s novel of sexual liberation you can probably skip.