Illuminating Fiction

Matthew Sharpe: Novels as Omnivores

57 Matthew Sharpe Novels as Omnivores The Sleeping Father, the second novel written by Matthew Sharpe, was rejected by twenty major publishers before it was purchased by Soft Skull Press for an advance of one thousand dollars. It tells the story of Bernard Schwartz, who unknowingly mixes two types of antidepressants, loses consciousness, has a stroke, and suffers brain damage—and his teenage children Chris and Cathy, who try to rehabilitate him on their own. After its September 2003 publication The Sleeping Father received a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review as well as an appearance in the “And Bear in Mind” slot. In February 2004 it was selected by the Today Show Book Club. Also in the same month renowned author Anne Tyler said, in a New York Times interview , “my favorite [book] this week is a fresh, funny, quirky book called The Sleeping Father, by Matthew Sharpe.” In June 2004 Warner Bros. optioned this novel. According to the New York Times, Sharpe’s first novel Nothing Is Terrible (2000) is “warped and oddly touching, Nothing Is Terrible is brain candy for the bright and jaded.” This novel tells the story of an orphaned sixth grader named Mary who prefers to be called Paul, who escapes from suburbia and moves to New York with her thirty-seven-year-old teacher/lover. The stories in Sharpe’s short story collection Stories From the Tube (1998) open with prologues taken from TV commercials. Anderson Clifton in his CNN.com review wrote that this collection “reads like a Canterbury Tales for the modern-day ad age.” In March 2007, Jamestown, Sharpe’s new novel was published. It’s a fantastical account of the Jamestown settlement of 1607 in Virginia. Sharpe has taught writing in many settings. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan College. He previously has taught at Columbia University and at the summer program at Bard College. From 2003 to 2004 he was the writer in residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters, an experimental writing-themed public school in the South Bronx; and as a graduate student at Columbia University he taught creative writing to children with the support of the Teachers and Writer’s Collaborative. 58 Illuminating Fiction Sharpe also has an experience as an author interviewer. Many of his interviews can be read at www.writenet.org. His short stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, BOMB, Southwest Review, Mississippi Mud, Nerve, American Letters and Commentary, Fiction, Witness, the KGB Bar Reader, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing, Teachers and Writers magazine, Details, Word, and Goodbye: The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries. Sharpe describes himself as a “sword-swallowing nutritionist and flaneur,” about which he says, “First one has to make sure to get one’s tongue out of the way—I tend to plant mine firmly in my cheek.” He divides his time between New York and Connecticut. Recently I spoke with him by phone. Sherry Ellis: The Sleeping Father begins with a description of circumstance . “Chris Schwartz’s father’s Prozac dosage must have been incorrect, because he awoke one morning to discover that the right side of his face had gone numb. This was the second discovery on a journey Chris’s father sensed would carry him miles from the makeshift heaven of health.” Do you believe that circumstance is a particularly effective means of enticing readers? Matthew Sharpe: I don’t think I have one particular way of beginning a book that I use repeatedly, or at least I hope I don’t. I borrowed that opening from Kafka. The Trial and The Metamorphosis have similar openings. I wanted that Kafkaesque sense that one’s life is about to go out of control, in a terrifying and unknowable and absurd way. That’s why I began in this particular story with circumstance. It is after all a kind of accident that causes the mechanics of the plot; that is, the accident of switching the pills. Ellis: Your first novel, Nothing Is Terrible, begins, “‘That girl is not normal, and neither is the boy,’ I overheard my uncle say to my aunt late one summer night a month after my parents had been killed in a car accident on the way home from a wedding. My twin brother Paul and I were ten years old at the time and were the children my childless uncle was talking about.” With this beginning, you...