Excellent character sketches throughout Hardwick's Sleepless Nights - but is this really a novel?

Ok, Elizabeth Hardwick's so-called novel Sleepless Nights has several good character sketches, recollections of various scenes and phases of the life of the narrator - a woman confined to a nursing home in Manhattan. The narrator, clearly a stand-in for Hardwick herself, led a peripatetic life, childhood in Kentucky in a family of intelligent but not well-educated people, early move to New York, years of living in asqualid mid-town hotel, eventual connection to the literary and cultural life of NY, which also entails various foreign travels such as a year spent in Amsterdam and summers in various country retreats, notably Maine. All this seems like it might be Harwick's life story, but several elements don't appear at all: her education, how she "made it" in the literary world, her marriage, her literary and editorial accomplishments - so the narrator is something like a deracinated Elizabeth Hardwick. The recollected stories and anecdotes that EH chooses to include in this retrospective are always well written, and some could stand alone as stories, sketches, or brief essays: the philandering physician friend from Amsterdam, whom she sees as a wreck and failure in later life; the vocal coach in her neighborhood who spirals into poverty and ends up as a bag lady on the street; the very few leftists in her home town in Kentucky (they will clearly remind you of some of the misfits in Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and their sad demise; et al - and you can see the trajectory: all of the character sketches begin with hopes and ideas and end in poverty and despair and loneliness. So what about the narrator herself? I have about 30 pp to go but it appears to this point that EH pulls her punches there, telling us little or nothing about the arc of the narrator's life - she's just an observer and a raconteur, and therein lies the fault in this work: The sketches and memories are find such as they are, but EH makes no attempt to bring them together in any conventional or even unconventional manner: There's no plot, no development of character over time. I don't mean to quibble, but this really is not a novel and should have been presented as a collection of essays or sketches. A great part of its interests to readers then (1979) and now, to the extent that there is still interest, has to do w/ EH's stature (co-founder of the NYRB) and on what light her memories can shed on the U.S. intelligentsia of her day - or even what gossip she can carry (the only "character" ID'd by name is Billie Holliday; as EH presented this as fiction, we wonder why she resorts to cryptic nomenclature such as Dr. Z - to make it feel more like a tell-all? Then why not put your cards on the table, so to speak).

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