Book Review: ‘The Sleepwalkers,’ by Scarlett Thomas

So is this a ghost story, or a time loop, or a memory play? For Thomas, nothing seems to be off the table. She shifts between erotic thrills, gothic drama, postmodern deconstruction and kitchen-sink realism. Through her bold storytelling, “The Sleepwalkers” becomes a work of peculiar, gonzo genius.

The story is told through letters, notes, guest book pages and other documents. We encounter 17 audacious pages of an uncorrected, almost illegible audio transcript. Elsewhere, gaps appear in paragraphs where someone else, presumably, has erased the writing. Some of the documents that make up the book have been torn or burned, which makes sense — the pages are as damaged and degraded as the characters themselves.

Exploitation, in different forms, emerges again and again in “The Sleepwalkers.” During university, Evelyn worked as a housekeeper for Richard’s family. Evelyn recalls how his mother insisted she eat “with them, treating her like a daughter almost. A daughter who cleans.” Now an actor and playwright, Evelyn is still trying to understand her employers’ power over her. Richard downplays his wife’s former position in his family home, and his own relative privilege. In a section of the novel rendered through one of his letters, he writes, “People assume they can know about someone else’s past because of their gender, or their social class, or their parents. Try asking them instead about the secret alliances they made, and who was blackmailing them, and the secrets they’d rather die than own. Ask them about their shame, and their darkness.” By the time they arrive at their honeymoon, both Evelyn and Richard have been eroded by large-scale forces as powerful as the storm that sweeps away the island’s beach every fall.

Reading “The Sleepwalkers,” I was wrong about so much; I wasn’t even looking in the right direction, and that process of disorientation felt corrective and necessary. Thomas takes a glamorous late-capitalist setting, with rosé and catamarans, and shreds, twists and warps it into a story that is surprising, humane and political to its bones.

THE SLEEPWALKERS | By Scarlett Thomas | Simon & Schuster | 289 pp. | $27.99