The witty opening of Elizabeth Harris’s “How to Sleep at Night” finds Ethan Keller confessing “something terrible” to his husband, Gabe: He wants to run for Congress. Ethan is a Republican, but Gabe is a Democrat, and Ethan says he won’t run if Gabe says no. Wanting to support his husband’s dreams and fearing the resentment a refusal could bring, Gabe agrees.
While Gabe and Ethan’s political rift is the crux of the book, Harris cools the stakes to a conflict between center-left and center-right. Gabe may be a Democrat, but he’s scornful of people he considers too far to the left, calling them “nuts”; in fact, he has tried to bond with Ethan by “poking fun at a clownish devotion to 16-letter acronyms and an eagerness to be offended by everything.”
Ethan explains his beliefs to their 5-year-old daughter privately by saying that Republicans believe change should happen carefully and people should make the decisions about their own lives.
He uses more provocative “woke mob” rhetoric in public, but Harris, a New York Times staff writer who covers book publishing, presents that as a performance that may or may not represent his convictions. Neither husband identifies with what he considers the extremes of his party, although both know their very existence as a gay married couple with a child has political significance.
More important than their divergent beliefs is Gabe and Ethan’s shared attitude about those beliefs, which is that they can be set aside when they don’t affect you directly. Gabe, a high school history teacher, can grit his teeth about Ethan’s growing notoriety until a couple of his students, both gay and one undocumented, start to trust him less in favor of a teacher he can’t stand. And what provokes Gabe’s discomfort most of all is the way people talk on the internet about him and his marriage.
Ethan treats his politics primarily as a vehicle for ambition; Gabe treats his as self-definition. The story seems headed for a confrontation between the two about how people should be treated and how the abstract idea of “politics” intersects with that question — but the confrontation never arrives. Over and over, when they approach the disagreements that seem too serious to ignore, they walk away, go to bed or change the subject.
This forestalling of what feel like inevitable and even necessary fractures can be frustrating and repetitive. But perhaps that’s the point: To make a relationship like this work, you will, over and over, have the same fight that goes nowhere.
The other strand of the novel follows Ethan’s sister, Kate, a print reporter, who reconnects with an old love: Nicole, a stay-at-home mom who’s grown bored with her wealthy, conservative husband. Kate is discombobulated by Nicole’s return and challenged by the thorny ethics of having her newspaper cover her brother’s campaign.
Kate and Nicole’s relationship is much more focused on the personal and less on the public, and it’s a thoughtful tale of people reconnecting in middle age with both the benefit and the baggage of long experience. And again, Kate’s story suggests that these are people for whom personal loyalty is primary. Everything else is negotiable.
Harris’s lively writing and the fast-moving narrative accompany what’s ultimately a bleak view of comfort in difficult times: The way to sleep at night, these characters find, is to secure your own future and make peace in your relationships, and then to think about what’s happening to the rest of the world as little as possible. As Kate muses at one point: “What’s Gabe supposed to do? Does he blow up a pretty excellent daily life for something that feels abstract? I don’t think most people would.”
You can sleep at night, in other words, through just about anything — if you don’t have to sleep alone.
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