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life can be sponged up without our becoming reluctant to call the book a novel? Sebald is the writer who plays most daringly with this project now. His narratives of mental haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an emotionally distressed alter ego who presses the claim of solemn factuality to the point of including photographs of himself among the many photographs that annotate his books. Of course, almost everything that would normally be disclosed in an autobiographical work is absent from Sebald’s books.
    Actually, secretiveness—which might be called reticence, or discretion, or withholding—is essential to keeping these anomalous works of fiction from tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use your life, but only a little, and at an oblique angle. We know the narrator of Sleepless Nights draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holiday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M—, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the
West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses—the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.
    To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
    There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories—fragments of memories, transformed—emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story. And Hardwick’s art of acute compression and decentering is simply too fast-paced to tell only a single story at a time; too fast, sometimes, to relate any story at all, especially where one is expected. For instance, there is much about marriage, notably a long-running soap opera starring the philandering husband in a Dutch couple, friends of the narrator and her then husband when they lived in Holland. Her own marriage is announced thus on the fifth page: “I was then a ‘we’ … Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition.” The ensuing silence about the “we”—a declaration of independence that has to be intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative, questing “I” capable of writing Sleepless Nights —lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: “I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, have passed.” Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers enough.
    But it’s not an autobiography, not even of this “Elizabeth,” who is made out of materials harvested from, but not identical with, Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s about what “Elizabeth” saw, what she thought about others. Its power is linked with its refusals, and its distinctive palette of sympathies. Her assessments of long-term sufferers in lousy marriages are pitiless, but she is kind to Main Street, touched by inept wrongdoers and class traitors and self-important failures. Memory conjures up a procession of injured souls: foolish, deceiving, needy men, some briefly lovers, who have been much indulged (by themselves and by women)
and come to no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women in archaic roles who have known only hard times and been indulged by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator’s mother, and several meanderingly sustained, Melanctha-like portraits of women who are invoked like muses:

    When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease and