Fiction That Captures National Prominence: A Sleeping Protagonist Makes It Happen

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum ’90 looks much like she did in 1990, and her manner seems about the same, too. She has a sweet round face, a mess of curls in her hair, and eyes that are quick to come alive. Her voice is strikingly high and small and even childlike, but her big gestures and her quick and animated patterns of speech suggest a decidedly adult intensity. In conversation with her, you can’t help but think that there’s a lot going on behind her eyes.

Any reader of her first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, published in September by Harcourt, would have to agree. Part fairy tale, part bildungsroman, the book, in very short chapters, tells the story of a young girl growing up in provincial France at a time that is difficult to place. When she falls into a deep sleep, we are plunged into a dream world of unlikely but likable characters and strange but pleasing scenarios. The man who performs a stage act based on his own flatulence, the magnificently fat woman who sprouts wings, the photographer with strange enthusiasms, the traveling gypsy circus—they are all here, and the question of what is real and what is imagined begins to dissolve, even as we are drawn into Madeleine’s story.

Madeleine Is Sleeping earned Sarah a spot among five finalists in fiction for the National Book Award, an honor that ensures an eager audience for her future work. She and her Milton classmate Dana Jackson are married and expecting their first child in April. After living for a number of years in the Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn, they are moving to Los Angeles to further Dana’s film career and give the growing family more space. For an aspiring writer, the experience of interviewing Sarah should have given me a serious Salieri complex, but it is too difficult to begrudge her this success. We met at a coffee shop in Brooklyn to talk about her book, the Milton roots of her writing and the controversy surrounding the National Book Awards.

EH: Maybe you could tell me a little bit about what you were setting out to do in writing Madeleine Is Sleeping. Do you remember when the idea for the book was born?

SB: Oh, absolutely. I was still a senior at Brown. And I had been recently exposed to so many texts that I was agitated and excited by. On the fiction side, Borges and Angela Carter. On the literary criticism side, Barthes and Irigaray and Foucault. So I was kind of in a state of foment [a bubbling gesture]. At the same time I was taking a class in hypertext. I was very computer illiterate, but I liked the idea of this tool, this way of crafting a story that was more Weblike rather than chronological. So originally it was an experiment, but I became so excited by this idea of having a sleeping protagonist at the helm of a story, and by all of the freedoms that offered, that I brought it back from hypertext onto the page. But I didn’t know it was going to be a book when I started writing. It was just this thing I was playing with.

EH: And you had other writing projects that popped up in the meantime?

SB: Oh, this hasn’t been my consuming obsession for the last ten years. I would hope it would be much fatter if it had been.

EH: In the times that you were working on it, was it slow going? Or are you a fast writer?

SB: I’m a horribly slow writer.

EH: Oh, good, so am I.

SB: I’m painfully, excruciatingly slow, in part because I don’t like to move on to the next sentence until I’m happy with the current sentence.

EH: It was clear to me in reading the book that a lot of attention was paid to the sounds and the rhythms of language. And some of those very short chapters struck me like poems, prose poems. Were there poets that influenced you, or did you ever think of it as poetry?

SB: No, but I’ve been so delighted by that comparison. In fact, it’s been turned into somewhat of an accusation [laugh], especially by the New York Times. But I’ve been delighted, because I’m awed by poetry, which is still this very mysterious medium to me. [Leaning in and speaking quietly] I don’t read very much poetry, just between us…

EH: Well the readers of the Milton Magazine might have to find out.

SB: Okay, between us and the readers of the Milton Magazine. [Laughs.] But, that said, the poetry book that did actually have a great influence on this—especially when I was about halfway through, and I was beginning to think of it as more than just a thing but maybe, possibly, a book—is Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which is a novel in verse. And that book just … completely transfixed me. It was a book that I kept returning to and reading passages from as I was finishing my book.

And, in fact, I have the same agent as Anne—not that I’ve met her, I don’t mean to say Anne like I’m on a first-name basis. His name is Bill Clegg. I had met him, and I really liked him, but at the time I thought it was too early in the process. But when I read Autobiography of Red, literally I rushed home from the bookstore and called him up. And it was all actually thanks to Mr. McCloskey [English department], because he’s the one who introduced me to Bill Clegg, and Bill ended up being such a major force in making this book happen. So I’m forever indebted to Mr. McCloskey for giving me that push. I had been teaching English for three years, and I hadn’t been writing. And he just felt strongly that I should try to give the writing a shot. Even though I said “I’m not ready, the manuscript is not done,” he was very adamant. He said, “Just do it, it’s not going to hurt.”

EH: In the book it is rarely clear to the reader—or at least this reader—what exactly is real and what is part of Madeleine’s vivid, fantastical dream life. And eventually I began to give up on the project of trying to separate one from the other. Is that okay?

SB: I’m so glad you did! The book very willfully blurs the two. The line between memory and dreams, and between one’s sleeping life and one’s waking life, seems so porous to me, that I wanted to avoid creating what to me would have been a false distinction. As opposed to something like Alice in Wonderland, where either she’s up on the riverbank, or she’s down the rabbit hole. I know the book asks for the reader to make a leap of faith—or a fall of faith, to go with it.

EH: Who influenced you at Milton? What activities or classes were important to you?

SB: Oh, Milton was where I caught the writing bug, for sure. It was having Mr. Smith my Class IV year, Red Smith, and then taking his creative writing class. There were some really great writers in that class. Theo Emery was in it. And I just remember being so…thrilled, and just feeling as if I was in my element, in that workshop. And then I also had wonderful experiences with Mr. McCloskey, though I didn’t study with him, and Mr. Connolly. And Kay Herzog, I had her as an English teacher.

EH: She is wonderful.

SB: Amazing. The Sound and the Fury, To the Lighthouse, books that feel so seminal to me—she was the one who unfolded them. When we did The Sound and the Fury, she read—not read, she recited—that passage from Macbeth, and I still have, in my 17-year-old’s handwriting, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Every time I read that passage, I hear her voice. So I have tremendous fondness and gratitude toward the English teachers I had. Randy McCutcheon too. I had him in Class III and adored him.

EH: What did it mean to you to be a finalist for the National Book Award?

SB: It was enormous—

EH: How did you find out?

SB: I was at my day job, and my boss had just asked me to order her lunch, and she wanted a chicken and avocado pressata. And Fran, the secretary, said, “There’s a Harold on line two for you.” And he launched into this explanation: “Out of so-and-so many submissions, you were one of the five finalists…” And it really did sound like I was being called by Publisher’s Clearinghouse. I kept waiting for that moment: “You just need to buy three magazine subscriptions.” I was so bewildered. But I wrote down his name and I Googled him, and sure enough his name came up as executive director of the National Book Foundation. And I completely lost it. The sense of astonishment kind of defies description. And then my boss yelled from the other room: “Did you get a chance to order that sandwich?” So that kind of immediately brought me back down to earth.

EH: You recently read aloud from your work in a large auditorium in an event for all the finalists. Can you describe what that was like? How nervous were you, scale of one to ten?

SB: I wasn’t nervous at all. When you’re reading you already have your script. The difficult part has been having to be interviewed and defend the book and speak to the National Book Awards controversy. That—that has made me nervous.

EH: Well, I have to do my duty and ask you about the hubbub you don’t like talking about.

SB: Oh, by now I’m an old veteran.

EH: The controversy surrounding the finalists in fiction was that all five of you were women who live in New York City. None of you is a household name, and according to one report, only one of your books has sold more than 2,000 copies. Some have criticized the panel of judges for picking overly obscure books.

SB: It’s really remarkable how much vitriol and passion this has awakened, particularly in the New York Times. Who knew?

EH: Also in The New Yorker, though the novelist Thomas McGuane said the fiction finalists were a sign of the “meltdown” of the National Book Awards. How do you respond to that?

SB: Among the five finalists, we’ve published 16 books—I’m the one who hasn’t pulled my weight there—and there are Guggenheims, and NEA fellowships, etc. These are very well respected writers, distinguished writers, and so “obscure” seems a misinformed way of describing them. I do have to say that the comment that was the most wounding was the Tom McGuane comment in The New Yorker.

I think I naively thought that another writer, especially a literary novelist, would not be joining the ranks of the critics, and instead would be speaking up on our behalf. He admitted he hadn’t read the books. So that was wounding. After a while I guess you get a little inured to it. But I have to say I’m relieved that it’s over.

EH: One of the other finalists, Christine Schutt, has said, “I think publishers are afraid of taking risks on something that is different.” Do you think that’s true?

SB: If that’s true, my situation is anomalous. I was lucky in that my agent found a publisher for it very quickly. And the publisher, Harcourt, got behind it immediately, from day one. They never tried to make it appear more conventional. They kind of embraced it in all its weirdness. But I don’t know if my limited experience is necessarily representative.

EH: Are you working on something now?

SB: I’ve been working on short fiction. I haven’t started on something longer. I’m anxious to, I’m excited.

EH: Do you think you might do a collection of your short fiction?

SB: I get asked that because a bunch of stories I’ve published have been about the same character, a middle school teacher, and are based on my experience teaching middle school. But I don’t want to just cobble together old stuff. I want to do something new.

Evan Hughes ’94
Evan is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books. Reach him at ehughes@aya.yale.edu.

Editor’s note: On January 19, Sarah visited Milton as a Bingham Lecture Series speaker. She dedicated her talk in memory of poet Lexi Rudnitsky ’91.

 

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