Standard Dreaming
A Novella
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Standard Dreaming
Narrated by:
A.T. Chandler
Buy Now for $16.99
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Narrated by:
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A.T. Chandler
About this listen
A unique novel of parents and children - and the spaces between them
Dr. Niels Berners - a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York - is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son's abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or in jeopardy, to discuss their feelings and seek a sense of community, comfort, and closure.
Hortense Calisher artfully strings together tales of healing, brilliantly tracing the shadow of the generational gap. With compassion and precision, she paints the bruised egos of concerned parents confronting very empty nests.
©1972 Hortense Calisher (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Divorced, estranged, and apparently allergic to meaningful human contact, Berners drifts through life in a fug of clinical detachment and vague self-pity. His secretary engages him in what can only be described as administrative murmurs, and his son, Raoul, quite sensibly loathes him. I’m with Raoul on this one.
There is, theoretically, a plot. Berners belongs to a support group of washed-up parents abandoned by their children and has decided that this generational estrangement signals the decline of the species. It’s a hefty claim and might have landed if the novel itself had any pulse.
Calishers renders it with such ponderous solemnity that even the more intriguing ideas collapse under the weight of their own abstraction.
Fine words butter no parsnips, and here they’re slathered everywhere to little effect. The prose has a faintly affected shimmer, as though hoping you won’t notice that absolutely nothing of consequence is happening. Is this really occurring, or is it all a dream? If it’s the latter, it’s the kind of dream you wake from wondering if you left the oven on, then forget about entirely.
It’s also maddeningly slow. Not dreamlike, not contemplative, just inert. A still life of a man sulking in a mid-century armchair, muttering thinly about extinction while waiting for his secretary to rebook a colonoscopy. At one point, I genuinely considered abandoning the book in favour of alphabetising my receipts.
If the book had been sharper, funnier, or even just weirder, it might have got somewhere. As it is, “Standard Dreaming” reads like the literary equivalent of white noise. This isn’t just meandering, it’s narcotised. A reverie with all the urgency of damp toast and about as much flavour. It ends - eventually, blessedly - with nothing much resolved, but by then, I’d lost the will to care.
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