April 7, 2014
Benjamin’s debut novel is a moving love story wrapped in the trappings of a sci-fi thriller. Gabe is a student at a boarding school in California, where he gives Sylvie, a fellow student, her first taste of love and also introduces her to the secret nighttime experiments of the headmaster, Dr. Keller. When it comes to falling in love, the details are sharp—from sticky Cheetos-flavored kisses at a school dance to the heart-slamming feeling of being ignored. The teenage relationship doesn’t survive high school, but Sylvie can’t shake Gabe’s memory. Then he reappears in her life and convinces her to leave UC-Berkeley before graduating and join him in working with Dr. Keller—now a sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducting experiments that are not as benign as they seem at first. As Sylvie and Gabe’s relationship begins, again, to fray, it becomes clear that they’re both harboring secrets. All this is brought into catastrophic focus by their friendship with the attractive couple next door. Benjamin has a deft hand for rendering both the stomach-twisting nature of early infatuation and the way relationships mellow over time. Sentences have a dreamy rhythm. The plot works best when the thriller elements focus on the love story. A sly, promising, and ambitious debut.
September 1, 2014
Dream researchers probe the subconscious, moral responsibility and the power of dreams on waking life. Sylvie narrates the story of her entanglement with Adrian Keller, a renegade researcher interested in lucid dreaming, and his acolyte, Gabe. Keller is the headmaster at Mills, a prep school in Northern California (having mysteriously left his university position), and Gabe is part of a group of quick-witted teenage students. Sylvie and Gabe become inseparable, though she tries to ignore his suspicious comings and goings from Keller's cottage. And then, without explanation, Gabe leaves school and vanishes from Sylvie's life until her final year at UC Berkeley. He begins stalking her, and when she confronts him, he asks the unthinkable-that she drop out of college and work with him as a research assistant at Keller's sleep institute. Sylvie is still in love with Gabe, so the two work with Keller on Martha's Vineyard, then at Fort Bragg and finally in the neuroscience department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. People with serious sleep disorders-sleepwalking and night terrors-come to learn lucid dreaming in hopes that the lucidity will help end their dangerous behaviors. In Madison they are neighbors to a flirty Finnish couple, academics who question the ethics of their research; they suggest that a person's knowledge of his or her deepest self can be treacherous. Unfortunately, none of this is as compelling or mysterious as Sylvie's narrative tries to make it sound. Further impairing the novel are the frequent chronological shifts used to build suspense; the flipping back and forth merely muddles the plot. As Sylvie begins to question Keller's work, she discovers the sordid truth about everything, but the twist at the end is hardly shocking enough to excuse the slow buildup.Though Benjamin can turn a nice phrase, this is an uneven first novel.
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