The Sleep-Over Artist: Fiction

by Thomas Beller

Overview

"In the same way Salinger carved out the niche of male adolescence ....Beller approaches that mutable boy-to-man territory."—San Francisco Chronicle

Writing with the sparkling wit and insight of his highly praised debut, Seduction Theory ("Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring ambivalence of youth."—The New York Times), Thomas Beller continues to plumb the adventures of his hero, Alex Fader, a youthful existentialist and sensualist with an insatiable appetite for trouble. The Sleep-Over Artist is an account of critical stages in Alex's life, mapping his progress from youthful delinquent to filmmaker whose career begins when he makes a documentary film exposing the prep school from which he has been expelled. Alex longs for the taste of family life that the early death of his father has denied him. As a young boy he sleeps over at his friends' houses and ingratiates himself with their families; as a young man he extends his sleep-overs to the lives of women, culminating in the ultimate sleep-over—an affair in England with a glamorous, slightly older woman, the mother of a young boy. Beller has a pitch-perfect ear for emotional nuance and a microscopic eye for rendering the wordless moments when a relationship catches fire and all too often begins to falter. The high-wire tension that electrifies The Sleep-Over Artist is Beller's ingenious portrait of a young man who longs to disappear and belong all at the same time.

"Hilarious....captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experience."—The New York Times Book Review, Katherine Dieckmann, 16 July 2000 "[W]ell-crafted stories recall the witty phrasing of Updike, the poignant nostalgia of Cheever, the earnest but confused innocence of Salinger."—Library Journal "Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions....A moving portrait."—Publishers Weekly, 17 April 2000  "The gentle humor and delicacy of Sleep-Over Artist remind me of the stories of another young cosmopolite, F. Scott Fitzgerald."—Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying "Fresh, sophisticated and most of all utterly readable...strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths."—Eva Hoffman "Tom Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life's sweet and unlikely subtleties."—Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch "A fine novel of Manhattan manners."—New York Observer

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393321715
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2001
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Thomas Beller is the author of Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist and How to Be a Man. He is a founder and editor of Open City magazine and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.com. He lives in New York City and New Orleans.

Table of Contents

	Falling Water	13
	Natural Selection	17
	Great Jews in Sports	40
	The Harmonie Club	63
	What Ever Happened to the Yippies?	72
	Stay (On Falling Asleep in the Company of Another Person)	88
	Vas Is Dat?	95
	Say It with Furs	142
	Personal Style	161
	Caller ID	179
	Seconds of Pleasure	191
	New Windows	279

What People are Saying About This

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Thomas Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life's sweet and unlikely subtleties. Amid bum deals and bad fate, The Sleep-Over Artist manages to relish the little victories and happy compensations—as Thomas Beller puts it—the seconds of pleasure that make it all worthwhile. This is a book that is surprised by surprise. It is also a work of great optimism and ambition and all that other good—and rare—stuff.

Eva Hoffman

In these tales of a young man growing up to encounter the confusions of modern masculinity, Thomas Beller has created a witty, observant, and often very poignant bildungsroman for our time. Fresh, sophisticated, and most of all utterly readable, The Sleep-Over Artist strikes the perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths.

Editorial Reviews

A fine novel of Manhattan manners.

New York Observer

In the same way Salinger carved out the niche of male adolescence ....Beller approaches that mutable boy-to-man territory.

San Francisco Chronicle

Hilarious....captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experience. —New York Times Book Review

Katherine Dieckmann

Tom Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life's sweet and unlikely subtleties.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

The gentle humor and delicacy of Sleep-Over Artist remind me of the stories of another young cosmopolite, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Stewart O'Nan

Fresh, sophisticated and most of all utterly readable...strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths.

Eva Hoffman

In this "sharp and witty" sequel to Seduction Theory, Thomas Beller continues to chronicle the adventures of his hero, Alex Fader, a youthful existentialist and sensualist with an insatiable appetite for trouble. This "beautifully" executed book "hooked" some of our booksellers. Others said, "it kept me turning the pages, but I got tired of hearing about Alex's sexcapades." "A great book for insomniacs." "Thank God, the chapters were short."

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Featuring a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions and betrayals, Beller's carefully crafted debut novel charts the coming-of-age of Alex Fader, already familiar from Beller's short story collection, Seduction Theory. Fader grows up "in an apartment on the 14th floor of a large prewar building that took up an entire block of Riverside Drive." His father, a psychoanalyst, dies when Alex is 10; his mother, a dancer, discovers in herself a talent for scholarship and eventually writes a large, authoritative tome on the moral origins of WWI. Alex himself, cousin to the characters in Rick Moody's novels, has a very '70s adolescence; while Moody's characters get their high school kicks in the post-Cheever suburbs, however, Alex is buying Thai sticks from a dealer in the Village and attending numerous extravagant bar mitzvah parties. Curious and keenly observant, he frequently sleeps over at his friends' apartments and perceives various patterns of family relationships. As he moves out of adolescence, Alex discovers his sensual nature. With his mother's image as archetype, he dates a series of successful, competent, beautiful women. Finally, he meets Katrina, an upper-class Londoner with a young son, who succumbs to his charm against her better judgment. Alex invariably adopts a boyish stance in his relationships, alternating between adoration and cruelty, but his conscience gives him trouble on another score. He and his cousin Karl have moved their Alzheimer's-afflicted Aunti B to an old folks' home in Pennsylvania, and Alex guiltily takes over her empty apartment. Always acutely conscious of his environment, he is uneasy living in a place redolent of his childhood, one that is not "clean of history." The narrative moves through Alex's 20s, and ends, symmetrically, with Alex, now a filmmaker, back in the Riverside Drive apartment, lunching with his mother. Beller has the true novelist's knack for weaving together the disparate threads of postmodern urban existence into convincing studies of character. The vignettes of Alex's life coalesce into a moving portrait of a young man intuitively seeking a place he can call home. (June) FYI: Beller is a founding editor of Open City magazine. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Less a novel than an interconnected set of stories . . . Beller captures perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's first sexual experiences.
—The New York Times Book Review

Kathrine Dieckman

These dozen stories follow the fortunes of Alex Fader from childhood through adulthood, with a focus on his romantic entanglements as a young man. Beller's prose is often sharp and funny but, like his protagonist, distractingly self-aware for too much of the book. Alex's friends and paramours remain bit players in the drama of Alex's evolution. The most moving vignette, "Stay," is the shortest, a mere six pages. Alex, freshly graduated from high school, encounters his mother in the predawn hours, as he ends his evening and she begins her writer's workday. The distance between parent and child, the pain they've shared since the death of Alex's father and the unspoken gratitude each feels for the other are all rendered perfectly in this gem. Perhaps it is the emotional depth of this beautifully understated moment that makes the other stories seem so callous.

Erin Doyle

. . manages to be a frank, likable book with an appealing central character . . . beguiling...
—The New York Times

Maslin

Like its predecessor, Seduction Theory (1995), this energetic collection of 12 related short stories explores various formative events in the life of documentary filmmaker Alex Fader. Well into adulthood, Alex is still looking (mostly in all the wrong places) for the love snatched away from him in his youth by his German-born father's early death from cancer and his `artistic` mother's inconstant maternal feeling. Thus Alex `sleeps over` at school-friends' homes and later in the lives of his lovers, most of whom, like the much older, divorced Englishwoman in the overattenuated `Seconds of Pleasure,` simply don't connect with his highly internalized existence. Alex is a potentially strong character, and Beller presents his emotional rootlessness most effectively in the opening stories, notably `Falling Water` and `Great Jews in Sports,` which feature dead-on renderings of the ways in which preadolescents process adult realities, keeping a safe, sardonic distance from devotion or commitment while never quite scratching the insistent itch to be accepted and to belong. Beller's tendency toward Salinger-like summary wisecracks (`German was the language of someone being really angry while in their underwear`) sometimes breaks the reader's concentration on Alex's defensive introspection, a problem that increases when the protagonist begins observing and recording his own experiences. Often enough, however, Alex comes through as a beguiling combination of smartass, nerd, and soulfully horny young man. And in the better stories—"Natural Selection,` in which the suicide of a classmate's father awakens Alex's memories of his own father's death; and the wonderful `Vas is Dat ?`aloving, grieving portrayal of an elderly aunt's senility, which both echoes and prefigures Alex's own solipsism—he becomes even more complex and sentient. Often accomplished, always interesting work from a writer who seems to be still finding his voice.

Kirkus Reviews