Honor Jones’ debut novel, “Sleep,” opens with 10-year-old Margaret hiding under a blackberry bush during a neighborhood game of flashlight tag.
We’ve all been there: crouched in suspense under the low branches, smelling the dirt and the night air, watching the legs of our friends dart past, everything cozy, wild, exciting.
But Margaret’s early years are not wholly idyllic. Something hangs over them, shadowing her current life as a 36-year-old, divorced mother of two.
Competent, successful, whip-smart, Margaret nonetheless doubts herself: Is she doing right by her kids? Should she have moved them to this apartment that is so small “she [can] disinfect the whole place with half a packet of Clorox wipes?” Do the women at the playground approve of her mothering? Can she avoid taking her daughters to their grandmother’s for a swim?
The internal monologue, in some ways normal for young motherhood, makes us wonder: What gives?
An editor at a New York magazine during the Harvey Weinstein era, Margaret (by virtue of being “the only senior editor on staff who was also a woman”) fields the MeToo essays pitched to the publication. While she evaluates and edits these stories of abuse, these varied “reassessments of desire, reassessments of consent,” her own story unfolds.
And the unfolding is brilliant. Jones releases clues — of a childhood in suburban New Jersey with upper-class parents and an unlikable brother — like breadcrumbs, at a pace in perfect proportion to how she comes to reassess what happened to her in that time.
Without giving too much away, I will say Margaret finally relents and takes her daughters to her childhood home for the weekend. There, we meet her brother, Neal, whom she studiously avoids hugging and will not look in the eye. We meet Margaret’s mother, Elizabeth “in a white tennis skirt … smelling of health and competency and the impossibility of sorrow.” We also meet Margaret’s ex, her childhood friend Biddy and Margaret’s current lover, Duncan.
