Madeleine is Sleeping
by Sarah Shun-lein Bynum

(Harcourt)

The natural state of the novel is, of course, the dream-state. Sitting down, looking at words but seeing pictures of imaginary people doing imaginary things. Now, of course, people in books usually do normal, if metaphorical, things. But sometimes, novel writers get extra-creative, and have to bring the dream into the dream state. Many writing teachers frown on this practice. Dreams, they say, are too easy. Wild, wacky, extra-metaphorical and crazy things happen in dreams: all in the name of imagination. If you must write dreams, they say, be extra careful.

Some writers take this as a challenge, of course, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is apparently one of them. She’s a dreamer, an imagination expert, one who just likes to make stuff up. So imagine, if you will, that you are dreaming. You’re just making stuff up. You might dream of fat women with wings, women who play themselves like a cello, sleeping children and suitors deceived by cookie-dough impostors. If this sounds like a dream you might be interested in sharing, you are ready for the world of Madeleine is Dreaming, Bynum’s debut novel. If not, you can safely stay away from this novel, and tell yourself you know now why writers should avoid writing dreams.

Set in a pastoral fairy-tale land of provincial France, the title explains the central conceit of the plot: Madeleine, adolescent child of a renowned artisan of jams and preserves, spends all of her time asleep, and the bulk of the novel concerns her dreams. She has a brief, manu-erotic affair with a local idiot, then as punishment has her hands turned into paddles. She runs away to join a circus, then joins a private freak-show and falls in love with a musician who plays his own flatulent anus to adoring crowds. And then, things start to get really weird…

Meanwhile in waking life, her family sets forth on their own series of adventures involving the mother’s jelly and preserves business, and an improbable scheme to marry off the always-sleeping Madeleine. But reality is as unsettled as the dream-world, and as the plot progresses so do the elements of unreality, until the real and the unreal collide, or rather run together not unlike two different jams shoved in the same jar. When (and if) Madeleine awakens to a world as bizarre as her dreams, what option remains for her?

Bynum’s prose is undeniably beautiful, her images vivid, her sense of language and metaphor are first-rate. Written using short, often one-page prose-poem chapters, this book reads quickly, like a dream state itself. And with its dream-state veneer, poetic language, and subtextual mash-up of fairy tales, popular children’s picture books, and female sexual awakening, this book could and probably will provide raw material for scores of future grad school papers. However, I suspect just as many people will be turned off by the fey slightness of the chapters, the pretentious airs of imagination, and the rather precious nature of the entire construct, spun as it is like candy-glass into the superstructure of a great gothic sugar-goop cathedral.

- Micheal Ramberg