Hard to classify Harwick's book Sleepless Nights

At first pass - 40 or so pp in - Elizabeth Hardwick's "novel" Sleepless Nights, recently reissued by the great New York Review Books series, is hard to classify; I've put "novel" in quotes, as that's how the book is categorized, though it has all the feel of a memoir - an elderly woman, in a nursing home?, reflects upon the various scenes, passages, adventures, and personalities of her life, in a series of memories that Hardwick presents as fragments and out of temporal sequence. So far, however, the book has none of the dynamics that we expect and in fact need in a novel; there is no character development, narrative plot, sense of unity of time/place/action, all of which makes it hard to make sense of this book as fiction. And that's OK because for most readers the interest lies in Hardwick's reflections on the literary figures of her time; to be honest, I think the book would have sold better had she called in her memoir - as it is, though we're interested, for ex., in reading her section on the friendship she struck up w/ Billie Holiday, our interest is piqued by the likelihood that this is an accurate recollection of Lady Day in her decline - if we were told that it's all fabricated, it would hold a lot less interest. There is other literary dish that I probably just am not getting (is one of the people she writes about the young Robert Lowell?), but I did enjoy her take on young aspiring artists and intellectuals living among the bereft and forlorn in a cheap mid-town hotel - the kind that no longer exists of course. Ongoing interest in this work will depend on how well she can bring the various fragments of memory together to form a mosaic, and on how much light she can shine on the culture of young aspirants in NYC in what I think is the 50s - how much the scene has changed, how much has remained the same.

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