2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL SULOCK
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LOVE, POWER, AND BEAUTY IN AN ASPIRATIONAL ROME a review by Mayee Zhu David Brendan Hopes. Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers. Black Mountain Press, 2020.
MAYEE ZHU served as an NCLR editorial assistant while earning her MA in English from East Carolina University. She has published fiction in 101Words, Flash Fiction Magazine, Nanoism, Five2One, and Flash. DAVID BRENDAN HOPES is an actor and a Professor in the Department of English at UNC Asheville. His short story “Corin and Dorinda” won second place in the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and was published in NCLR Online 2019. His novel The Falls of Wyona (also reviewed in this issue) won the 2018 Quill Prize from Red Hen Press. His plays Uranium 235 and Night Music have been performed at Asheville’s Magnetic Theatre, and his latest book of poems, Peniel, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2017.
ABOVE Lexington Ave, Asheville,
NC, 2009
Set in Asheville, NC, David Brendan Hopes’s Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers is a love letter to the city, which becomes almost a character itself. The author describes historical landmarks and community centers in vivid detail, from Asheville’s exclusive Masonic Hall to the bustling Lexington Avenue. Hopes notes that “Asheville, though hit hard by the Depression, was a land of possibilities” (7), a perception that applies to both the town and to its denizens, from secret millionaires to a down-on-hisluck adolescent boy who is not only ethereally beautiful but also a talented artist. In spite of setbacks, these characters continue to see life in Asheville filled with opportunities. The secret millionaire, TJ, only discovers his dream of becoming a public official after trying to commit suicide by overdosing. After he survives, he comes to an epiphany that he wants to make something out of his life: more specifically, run for public office and reshape Asheville. Talented teenager Charlie moves to Ashville with dreams of producing art, despite his
traumatic history of abuse and neglect by family members and caretakers. This dream unwittingly causes TJ and Charlie’s lives to intertwine not long after Charlie arrives in Asheville. But first, Hopes dives into TJ’s childhood to examine the events that sent the character down his road of depressive self-medication. We learn that growing up, TJ always admired the beauty in others and had an archetypal Oedipal dependency on the only family member who showed him true kindness, his mother: “TJ worshiped her. She was always the prettiest girl to him. For a while he thought he would never marry but stay with mother forever. She needed him. She depended on him” (13). This obsessive nature carries through to all of TJ’s future relationships, notably emerging in the one he develops with Charlie. He and the boy become very close, both physically and emotionally, though the two never consummate their relationship. It’s a rather odd dynamic and even TJ himself “could not be sure exactly what was meant. . . . He held Charlie tight and nibbled his neck and ear and lis-