Capturing the Unphotographable: Mira Jacob’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to DancingBy Mira JacobRandom House, 2014The first assignment in my first college creative writing seminar was a poem. I can’t remember the task or what I wrote. I do remember that one student’s poem stood out from all the others. It was a portrait of a father who sat drinking a scotch after returning from work late at night. It couldn’t have been more than a few lines, and to my mind it had the perfection of a crisp black and white photograph of love, longing, and exhaustion. It was by Mira Jacob, and since then I have been waiting to read her first book.The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing did not disappoint. It is a beautiful portrait of the struggle between family and freedom. But good novels tend to be about a lot of things. This one is also about neuroscience (and minds that fail us), photography, the lasting trauma of immigration to the US, and the miracle of finding a soul mate.Midway through the novel, a high-school girl says to her brooding boyfriend, the child of South Indian immigrants, “So what… We’re a country of immigrants, and you’re the first wave. At least you’ve got an opportunity to set your own stereotype.” Naïve as the sentiment might be, all of the characters in Jacob’s novel long to define their own fate.The protagonist Amina is a photographer living in Seattle, a decade out of college and unmarried. She reluctantly travels home to New Mexico when she learns that her father is spending his evenings speaking with deceased relatives. In the process, she is drawn back into her nuclear family – a family that oozes complicated, guilt-filled love for one another, a family that has never fully addressed a shared tragedy.The novel spans two continents. Amina's parents, immigrants from India, left their own families in the 1960s. The book opens with a tense vacation to India, where those still living in the ancestral household remain resentful of the favored son’s departure for the United States. The American-born Amina, still a child, is only vaguely aware of the wounds incurred when the family chooses to leave their relatives’ house early – a reenactment of immigration of sorts:

Bad. They were doing something bad. What, exactly, she wasn’t sure, because no single element – the packed bags, the eating upstairs, the sweating outside now – seemed like a horrible act in itself, and yet somehow it had turned them against the Salem house, landing them up in the driveway like pillagers escaping with a country’s pride.

But even in the rapidly globalizing 20th century, some departures are unidirectional. Jacob’s most poignant moments find characters struggling to continue their relationships with deceased loved ones. Jacob’s well-paced writing, laced with a hint of magical realism, lends sweetness to her heartbreaking descriptions of grief. Family members love and mourn one another in the future, present, and past tenses. They attempt to undo tragedy by reversing time in their minds and resort to superstitions in an effort to keep each other safe. Jacob’s characters also see each other (sometimes blurred, sometimes in brutally vivid color) through a variety of prisms: in the flesh, through a window, through a camera lens, in an MRI scan, in a fantasy, in hallucinations.Physical ailment, especially neurological conditions, pattern key aspects of the story: characters suffer from noctambulism, epilepsy, addiction, and even brain tumors. However, Jacob avoids the trappings of the “neuro-novel,” a recent genre that the critic Marco Roth has faulted for relying too heavily on the physical basis of neurochemistry. This story is about psychology, not psychiatry. It is about human interactions and not about syndromes.Jacob’s idiosyncratic, multi-dimensional characters are all, in various ways, artists engaged in a lifelong creative process. Amina’s brother channels his teenage angst by painting his heroes’ faces (among them Gandhi and Che Guevara) on the ceiling. The protagonist’s mother attempts to fit into the US by wearing parachute pants and mastering the art of French Cooking. Amina’s father, a neurosurgeon who is passionate about his work, spends his spare time building bizarre gadgets in the backyard.The circumstantial relationship between two American subcultures – first generation immigrants from India and American Indians – provides an unsettling backdrop to a novel about a family finding its place in the US. When the protagonist inadvertently photographs a man’s death her creative aspirations abruptly halt. She becomes consumed with the story of her accidental subject – a painful sequence of events involving the native peoples of America’s Northwest, lost territory, and poorly managed restitution payments. Bungling into a tribe’s tragedy, Amina is forced to relive aspects of her own family’s tragedy and to confront the dangerous power of her art.Amina is blessed and cursed with the ability to capture the most painful moments on film: a vomiting bridesmaid; a sexual liaison; a ghost; a suicide. She cannot unsee the pictures she has taken. Part of her personal struggle involves coming to terms with her art, and admitting that she finds beauty in it. Jacob, too, manages to capture the unphotographable. Painful moments are suspended, as if being held up and examined in the light:

Something round a hard moved from Amina’s throat to her gut, making it difficult to breathe.Strangely the bruise had the effect of making what was beautiful on her face more so, her nose more patrician and lips more full and the good eye somehow better than it had been before, so that the sum of her parts gave her the air of a harrowed starlet, of glamour all lit up with tragedy.Every light in the shop was on as well, even those that had not been on in so long that they were bearded with spiderwebs.

But if the novel is full of traumatic images, it is also full of delightful love stories. Amina is, after all, a wedding photographer who admits to enjoying her work. The most vivid of these stories is Amina’s parents’ deepening love for one another, a love that takes them to what appears from the outside to be the brink of absurdity. And yes, Amina too gets her turn.___Amelia Glaser is an Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California, San Diego.