When your material involves comatose parents and harmful antidepressant cocktails, it’s got to be hard to be as relaxed as Matthew Sharpe OC ’85 was last Thursday when he read from his novel The Sleeping Father, which involves both of those things.

In the following Q & A, Sharpe claimed to “have no idea” where his stories were going until he began writing them, and indeed The Sleeping Father appeared to be driven mostly by strong character work and by whatever happens when a novelist does serious research on pharmaceuticals.

Immediately, Sharpe’s coloring of characters Bernard (the depressed and eventually comatose father) and Chris (his son) lent its strength to other aspects of the novel, especially to his antiseptic but hilarious descriptions of the pharmacy where Bernard picks up the wrong medication. 

When questioned later about the process of writing the novel, Sharpe said he had lacked a conflict until he encountered a very obvious one in his research on antidepressants — the combination of Prozac and Nardil.

At any rate, the combination is very bad, he said, and something very bad is just what a novel needs. It was a simple enough, and seemingly easily exhaustible, conflict — but Sharpe did not rely on the drama of bad meds for too long. His character work, by far his strongest suit, returned to make an otherwise much-harped-upon topic — chronic depression — feel fresh.

For example, when Bernard becomes comatose as a result of his meds-mixing, his son has an extensive internal monologue in his father’s hospital room, and ends up drawing with black and red indelible ink all over Bernard’s sleeping face.

To his credit, Sharpe also cut such scenes short just as they threatened to feel like mere character exercises — after what sounded like several pages of Chris coloring Bernard, Chris had to pee at just the right moment. 

Although Sharpe read as though he were listing the symptoms of an immune system disorder, his dry manner actually lent itself to the writing, which was by turns wryly humorous and deeply beautiful.

After Bernard comes out of his coma, the teenage Chris undertakes his father’s rehabilitation, focusing mostly on telling him “everything” there is to know about the world. Bernard quickly and inadvertently takes control of this process, however, by becoming perplexed about the semiotic concept of “tree.”

“Every time I say tree, does that mean I’m talking about every tree everywhere?” he asks.  When the answer is no, the logical next step is for father and son to go outside and name every tree they see. Like any good writer, Matthew Sharpe is clearly obsessed with naming, so Bernard and Chris not only name the trees, but also a series of other things encountered on their walk, and finally, “when the sky was dark, they named the darkness.”

Such moments were rare and breathtaking releases from the novel’s descriptions of interactions between seemingly limbless, boneless creatures — recognizable as humans only by virtue of their sadness. The overarching numbness of Sharpe’s selection only made such fleeting earnestness more believable and moving.  

Since graduating from Oberlin, Sharpe has since taught at such diverse institutions as the Bronx Academy of Letters (a public school in the South Bronx with a focus on writing), Bard College’s Milton Avery Fisher Graduate School of the Arts, and currently, Wesleyan University. He has published another novel, Nothing is Terrible, and a book of short stories, Stories from the Tube.