Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers

July 10, 2020

SL has had a stroke. Apparently the recovery was swift (he writes about it himself) but–

Got my haircut from lovely Celeste with the five-colored hair. Had a drink at Cappella’s. It was sad and empty, but not THAT sad and empty

Looked out the window to see other turkey and her four chicks touring my garden. They stayed a long time, the babies chomping on somethng down in the grass.  My across-the-street neighbor was touring the garden just as they were, and the seven of us. . . looked at one another.

So, here is Branyon’s review as it appears in Rapid River:

How many Asheville book reviews have claimed to discover Asheville’s next literary genius, our next Thomas Wolfe? Well dagnabbit, here’s another. But this one will provide irrefutable proof that David Hopes’ new book, Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers, is as lovingly luscious as Look Homeward Angel and other Wolfe masterpieces.
Consider that Hopes repeatedly displays Wolfe’s powerful energy and elegant sentence structure. In describing Shakespeare-in-the-sunsetting Montford Park he gushes: “Whatever was happening on stage, the west was flaring pink and lilac and the grass was pearled incense and great white moths fluttered in the stage lights.”Or the description of a first climax: “The orgasm came over him in two waves, one quizzical, tentative, the other like a battering ram on a wooden door, bursting, sundering, setting free.”
And then there’s Hopes’ thinly disguised depictions of numerous local luminaries. Take long-serving Asheville DA, “Orville Moody” who viewed “naked shows of force” as “one of the perks of his office” and “everyone hates his guts, half his guts hate half his other guts.” Or the poetry slam emcee’s whose incandescent egotism made people want his “poem to be worse than it was,” but “jackass or not, the guy was mesmerizing.” Then there’s Milo Crane, the “short, hairy, intense man who owned the three-story art gallery” called the Green Cube, and who “wanted people to love art more than he wanted to sell it.” Ahem.
More than fifty local denizens get such rough and/or complementary treatment, as well as many area institutions and subcultures. Anyone who’s participated in Asheville’s wealth, poverty, LBGQT, straight, art, poetry, music, political, law enforcement, skateboard — and much more — life will probably recognize them.  So much so that Hopes might be run out of town on a literary rail and, like Wolfe for a while, literally not be able to go home again.
In addition there’s the Wolfe-like gigantic scope where settings range from parties at elegant homes on Sunset and Town Mountains to the cavernous catacombs of squatters in the abandoned, 1970s downtown Asheville; or at the Vance Monument, Biltmore Forest and All Soul’s Churches; or in the maze enigmas of the Masonic Temple and the sultry sanctuary of the late lamented Vincent’s Ear — or a past rendition of the current gay bar, Scandals; or in sexual and political dynamics of the downtown YMCA weight room and the Pritchard Park drum circle that inspires Hopes to sigh: “Bless you little town for being so weird.” And in so many others.
And yes, Hopes façons de parler sometimes simulates Wolfe’s vibrant leaping from feverish scene to frantic action. Yet he may even exceed Wolfe by displaying a controlled omniscience of storytelling that is positively Steinbeckian. Of a smoldering Ohio home Hopes writes: “The people inside had burned to death, so there was a certain purity about it, no screaming over somebody left behind, no wailing over lost possessions, only the crackle of the fire and the firemen yelling at one another.”
Yet unlike Wolfe, the Hopes’ novel still retains the gentle, enchanting whimsy of say a Madeleine L’Engle. For instance, a rattled TJ rhetorically asks his cat Buddy how he got in the house. “Through the cat door,” the cat surprisingly snaps back, “if you mean most recently. Further back, you brought me here. I am your cat.” An extensive, humorous interspecies conversation ensues — and it’s not the only one. In addition, Hopes’ scenes are often fully, leisurely savored, not always slam-dunked impressively but briskly, like our exuberant Thomas.
And though Wolfe’s books are morally and sexually wild, they aren’t half as unbridled as Dreams of Lovers. Take the most discussed painting of the book — a self-portrait of the character Charlie holding his erect penis. Yet Charlie’s horribly abused childhood makes that rendering almost inevitable. and thus easily digestible. Some other paintings are so similarly, innocently pornographic that a Mapplethorpe-type scandal might cause even more “Cesspool of Sin” howls from Republican Raleigh. Perhaps to the point where they morally quarantine our city and a new Inquisition censors Asheville’s weirdness and growth? Possibly. If the book sells as well and broadly as it should. 

 Gender Fluidity Meets Artistic Rigidity
. Many of the book’s characters are deeply developed, but Charlie, TJ, Barry and the city of 1980s and `90s Asheville are the most richly and realistically conceived. TJ and Barry begin their teenage years surrounded by Town Mountain prosperity where “Bicycles were freedom. Once the boys were mounted they were their own masters” riding down to the desolate, 1970s Asheville that “stood fundamentally vacant.” After rush hour was over the boys “could have six square blocks to themselves, with only the disco from a single gay bar [O’Henry’s] to interrupt the nighthawks and the dopplering sirens. The rest sat empty as the craters of the moon. It was boy paradise.”
There they would sometimes taunt the ancient Romulus Patton (an heir of James Washington Patton of Patton Avenue fame) while he was inspecting his extensive Lexington Avenue properties. The boys imagined him “the old Asheville, KKK-governed, debt-ridden, threadbare and in some indefinable way, disreputable.”
Barry quickly discovers he’s gay and in love with the gender-dysphoric TJ. Yet TJ remains chillingly cold in part because “Long ago” his parents had “arrived at an agreement by which they shared with each other nothing about their inner lives.”  These and other ominous descriptions vividly explain TJ’s incipient sociopathy.
The two are somewhat separated by college choices: Duke for Barry’s premed aspirations, and UNCA for TJ at the suggestion of Moody. The DA claims half the professors there “will do you no harm, and that’s a better percentage than you’re likely to get anywhere else.”
UNCA is where TJ first hears a resounding, but not annoying theme in Hopes’ book: Artists will leave Asheville if we continue to price them out of their housing, gentrify their inspiration, and Scrooge their meager sources of existence. Or as UNCA professor Miss Vogovna “who ran the famous dance academy in town” and was “thin as twigs, somewhere between 40 and 70, still seductive” teaches in an affirmative way: “What caused the Renaissance? … Money… The Gonzagas. The Boromini. The Pamphili. The Franese. The Medici…They realized that in the right hands, money is an art. They created — civilization.” 
Hopes believes Asheville could actually become the Paris of the South — as well as East, North and West. In an interview he mentioned New York City's WestBeth apartment complex as a good way to start. It involves 13 buildings spanning an entire city block and dedicated to providing rent-controlled housing to 384 artists of all types. The compound includes an art gallery, studios and performance spaces fostering its tenants’ work. Current average monthly rent, electricity included, is $800 per month — in top-dollar real-estate Manhattan.
But Hopes predicts Asheville probably won’t achieve Parisian potential because we’re addicted to following the heartless path of maximized profits and rents — and minimized wages. Luckily, in his book the artists don’t have that problem, having arrived before Asheville’s exploding rents forced out downtown artists. On the contrary, they are rent-free squatters living in what would feel like atrocious conditions to 21st-century sybarites — and unused to talking stray cats, friendly rats and occasional fat bats. 
Murder Mystery or Art History?
TJ is inspired by Miss Vogovna’s vision and uses his money to help finance some of the downtown revitalization that has made Asheville what it is today.  He also allows a few artists, actors and kids to keep their free rent, but he begins to undermine them in other nefarious ways. 
Meanwhile, in Cleveland (Hopes grew up in Akron) Charlie, a scintillating force of artistic nature who’s obsessed with sketching, is being raised by a neglectful, suicidal, yet hilarious mother. He eventually lands with a foster family and when he realizes he’s going to be evicted from even it, thumbs a ride South, and makes friends with free spirits in Asheville.
The scenes where Charlie bonds with street-wise Board, Leontyne, Denbo, and Abby are so sweet, nurturing and feral that Hopes deserves his own 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the tempting valley of the bountiful bourgeois, David Hopes restoreth my bohemian soul — all our bohemian souls — by putting phallic flesh and emotional bones on the tenacious teens and ragged adults pilgriming through our gorgeous city.” After reading Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers, one can no longer dismissively say we don’t want their vagabond sort. Instead, we’ll have to understand they are whole souls, often with amazing stories of brave creativity, tragic accidents or hundreds of other tales as to why they’re street bound.
After finally finding a relatively secure home in the extremely gender-fluid digs, Charlie commences to sketch with and on anything he can find. In fact, anyone wanting a vicarious experience of mature gender fluidity, read this book. At least five major characters are wrestling with or expressing their evolving sexual identities. Yet, at least in Charlie’s world, there’s not the usual angst associated with such struggles.
The now Dr. Barry recognizes Charlie’s genius and gives him bona fide canvasses and oil paint. Unbeknownst to Barry, TJ does the same and they, along with DA Moody and the APD, race toward a crescendo that’s shocking and heartwarming at the same time. Meanwhile, bones of a possibly murdered woman found behind Charlie’s homestead walls shriek for justice — and for Charlie’s artistic vindication.
My only complaints about Hopes’ tour de force are several plot twists that felt uncharacteristic of the characters and jarring to the story, sometimes giving the book an almost soap-opera feel. But Hopes’ quickly follows these with denouements that make the apparent cacophony harmonious and often redeemingly beautiful. His most dissonant twist involves the plot pinnacle set at Asheville’s Green Cube. It has an intensity reminiscent of Hugo’s climactic Hunchback of Notre Dame scene. Yet the tying up of those loose ends and the healing resolution of dangling facts give the reader such satisfying closure that all the so-called surfeit of drama apparently, inevitably had to happen.
I’ve only scratched the surface of the multiple plots, tantalizing Asheville settings, and familiar people that left me galloping back to read, several times a day. I’ve also overemphasized the sexuality of the book. It’s mostly fun Platonic action and chaste, profound character depth.
Nor has Hopes suddenly arrived full-blown on the Asheville literary world in all his Wolfe-arian splendor. He’s made literature dazzling for thousands of students at UNCA for over thirty-five years, written five novels, composed four poetry books and had over twenty plays performed in Asheville, New York and Los Angeles — all while painting legions of charming, symbolist works. He certainly has the artistic chops to challenge the splendid Wolfe. But in the end of course, it’s you dear reader who will have to decide if you lavishly love Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers as much as you lustily liked Look Homeward, Angel. I delightfully did — and definitely have. And such logic leads to the conclusion that someday Asheville tourists may be touring the Old Kentucky Home of Hopes.