Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409040005
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by CAMILLE WRIGHT MILLER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Elizabeth Berg. Random House. $18.
Ann, a nurse, knows that checking for a pulse with the thumb is useless because we feel our own heartbeat with our thumbs. Still, she will use her thumb if she's present when Ruth dies; she plans "on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go." Such is the depth of feeling she has for her best friend.
A best friend brings a richness to our lives we might not miss if we'd never had it, but which would be forever mourned once experienced and lost. With Ann we experience both that kind of friendship and that profound loss through her conversations with Ruth.
The conversations have a warmth and honesty similarly found in the talk which occurs before sleep overtakes. We have these intimate talks with our babies before we put them to bed, with our husbands after the lights are turned out, and with our best friends in difficult times. Psycholinguists have made much of women's use of conversation to make community with others; Elizabeth Berg's novel is excellent evidence of what women-talk means and does.
"Talk Before Sleep" is the history of a friendship that does what best friendships do - changes those who own it.
Women readers will immediately recognize the conversations. The talks aren't profound sentences following one after the other; they are conversations about both the mundane and the important. The most important is Ruth's diagnosis of breast cancer.
The novel is witness to the journey toward separation caused by death. Ruth will die and there is nothing that her best friend Ann or Ruth's other friends (L.D., Sarah, and Helen) can do to stop the dying. They can, however, ensure that Ruth's last days of living will be as complete as possible.
There are moments in the reading that cause pain as death strides closer, but the whole of the novel is celebratory. Even recognizing that Ruth will die, there is pleasure in the fullness of good friendship. The friendship is not about death. It is about sharing laughter, honoring cravings for comfort foods like french fries and lobster, and caring for the friend in need. Friendship is about how we live our daily lives.
Elizabeth Berg has a keen ear and hand; she writes dialogue that rings so true it suggests she simply rewrote conversations to which she was privy. The truth is happier: she understands the reasons and dynamics involved in friendship. Berg is stunning in her accuracy as she conveys the rhythms of time spent with friends.
The novel was written as both tribute to friendships broken by breast-cancer deaths and as a reality call to the inadequate funding of breast cancer research. The latter is not written into the story but is given in a brief preface and in disconcerting statistics appended to the text. Berg lets us experience the joy of friendship, understand the loss, and then realize that our friendships are vulnerable, too.
- Camille Wright Miller is an organizational development consultant based in Lexington.
by CNB