[...] Whole towns, years, marriages are fitted into a paragraph or two. Juxtaposed, the paragraphs form a map, a grid of spatial and temporal relations within which the narrator exists. We thought we were exploring a single life, and are brought to see that no life can be single, that anyone’s solitude is dense with the imagined solitude of others.

In the end we are left with an extraordinary apprehension of all that is elusive, haunting, unrecoverable in the human past and, simultaneously, of something proportioned, fixed and flexible in shape, an object to be contemplated: the book, or more precisely this book. What the book cannot hold is lost, and even what it can hold is lost, but the book is not lost. In some sense Sleepless Nights asks the impossible of writing, that it share in the life of which it is made, that it remain unfinished, that the door stay open. The result is an object at once open and closed, mysterious and fully articulated: a book written in the form of a life.

The paratactic laying-out of details—In Kentucky the “wrinkled, broken jockeys with faces like the shell of a nut,” in Manhattan the affluent young couples “taking off the stoop so that drunks cannot loiter, making a whole floor for the children to be quiet on”—stripped of connective material