Georgeann Packard's Fall Asleep Forgetting first came to my attention as a finalist for last year's Lambda Award. As a tale of interwoven lives (including a suicidal restaurateur, an adulteress, a jealous transvestite, a homophobic war veteran, and young tomboy who holds it all together), set in a rather unique trailer park, it manages to successfully hold its own against such a diverse cast of characters.

Although slow moving and, at times, a little repetitive, this is a wonderfully poetic story that is as much a joy to 'hear' as it is to 'read.' It takes a strange road to get started, jumping decades and characters, but there's a theme of loneliness that ties it all together. The story itself doesn't really get moving until the discovery of a body on the beach, but that's okay because it's an interesting ride getting there.

It may seem odd to talk of a story that's all about relationships, and to say it's haunted by a theme of loneliness, but that's part of why I enjoyed it so much. There's nothing obvious or expected about the writing, and you really have to accept the characters quirks in order to appreciate this scattered glimpse into their lives. This is also a novel about obsessions and excesses - sexual, emotional, physical, and culinary - and about the consequences of those excesses.

This wasn't the story I expected, but sometimes that's for the best. I would much rather be surprised and delighted by a tale, than to come away feeling . . . well, complacent. On the one hand, I think it could have benefited from a stronger focus on fewer characters but, on the other hand, I'm not sure it would have worked as well without them. I've thought about that for a few days now, and I still can't make up my mind, which is just fine by me.

I almost hate to say it, because it seems so obvious to me (yet hasn't been mentioned in a single review that I've seen), this is the kind of story that seems to cry out for a David Lynch screen adaptation. If that scares you away, then it's probably best that you take a pass, but if that intrigues you, I think you'll appreciate the read.
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Georgann Packard's book "Fall Asleep Forgetting" was an enjoyable reading experience for several reasons. First, her character development was authentic and ingenious. Each character held the reader's interest, leaving questions about how they came to the point in their life that brought them to the trailer park. The setting itself allows for scene after scene of circumstances affected by the trailer park itself, on the Eastern tip of Long Island. The action occurs across one summer and through the journal entries of one character and the involvement of the other characters. I felt as though each character was thoroughly believable and Packard's writing would have held my interest if it was not already intrigued by the character's themselves. It is often written like a prose poem with lovely images. Sometimes Packard writes such vividly painful scenes that the reader is captivated not only by the story but by its connection to reality. This book is difficult to describe and is worth reading so pick up a copy. ( )

The appreciation of a novel can occasionally come down to something as random as timing. When one reads a book too early or too late, one can miss important elements within the story. This reviewer read Lord of the Rings too late and found its cod-archaic prose akin to downing a sedative. Similarly, when reading Paradise Lost in middle school, the only thing gained was “bragging rights” since the poetry remained impenetrable. All this represents a roundabout preface for my appreciation of Georgeann Packard’s novel Fall Asleep Forgetting.

In the months leading up to September 11, 2001, the inhabitants of Cherry Grove experience life-changing events. These events disrupt things spiritual and temporal, albeit in a non-linear fashion that forces the reader to figure out things for themselves. The novel opens with events in 1959 that will have consequences in 2001. Packard populates Cherry Grove, a Long Island trailer park located two hours from Manhattan, with its share of eccentrics, curmudgeons, and recluses. These include Cherry, the transvestite who renamed the trailer park, previously owned by her parents, both devout Roman Catholics. Claude is a park employee and amateur photographer, whose dated journal entries provide a commentary on the events at hand. Sonny and his wife Rae appear as a happily married couple, living in a trailer with their precocious daughter Six. Paul, a black poet, and owner of the Spiritoso, a nearby restaurant, comes to grips with his terminal illness. He and his sullen wife Sloan end up dealing with the disease in a manner that disrupts the isolation and sexual identity of Claude.

The accumulated quirks may lead to the charge that the novel is precious or twee. Literary novels, like independent films, can be guilty of such a charge, at least when poor writing or lazy plotting reduce the terms “literary” and “independent” into meaningless buzzwords meant only to move units on a bookshelf. Book reviewing is a subjective art and subjectivity, like taste, is not the same for everyone. The same is true for Fall Asleep Forgetting. The novel represents the highest form of literary art, a deft melding of religion, sex, love, illness, and death into a compelling story. The only comparable work that comes to mind in this regard is Evelyn Waugh’s masterful Brideshead Revisited, a novel of genius despite its flaws, snobbishness, and mean-spirited attacks on the lower classes. Fall Asleep Forgetting balances emotional sentiment and the hard events of everyday life with a sumptuous sensuality. The balance parallels the best made Cosmopolitan, a cocktail dependent on the exact proportions of Vodka, Triple Sec, and cranberry juice.

The novel begins with a drowning in 1959 and quotidian events in Cherry Grove in 2001. In the beginning, events unfold in an almost haphazard manner, interspersed with Claude’s journal entries. Not until later on do the seemingly random events and the journal entries gel into a whole. When events finally interlock, fraying relationships collide, sexuality becomes confused, and strongly held religious beliefs create friction and fears. The story hurdles forward with a feverish velocity, swept together in a mélange of memory, dream, and revelation.

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Several days ago I finished reading Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard, a beautiful first novel about people living in a trailer park at the eastern tip of Long Island. The first part introduces the characters each one with a special view of life and what that means. Some characters were born different, some grew to be different. One of them is dying. The whole novel occurs across one summer, the dying person’s last summer. Each person sees his decline, each person handles his demise differently. A little girl, Six, sees school as torment and spends most of her energy getting away from the classroom. She is a free spirit, living easily in the sea, on the beach and in the woods surrounding the trailer park. One person is a male, but dresses as a woman and her lover is a gay man who once worked on Wall Street, but found a home at the trailer park. He falls to the flirtation of Six’s mother and the gay couple suddenly falls apart. Another character, possibly the main character, keeps a journal, written in italics, giving us an ongoing description of her feelings as the summer progresses. One couple, the woman very sad and living in a past event and the man a gifted chef run a restaurant close by the park. The emotional and physical involvement over the summer between the park guard who keeps the journal and the wife of the chef is an intense ongoing part of the novel. The dying man of this tale has planned each aspect of his death except for one – a very surprising end to his life.
I enjoyed this read very much, but found myself often floundering because this tale is one to be read in one sitting, which I didn’t do. Thus, I found myself reading again – and again…. The writing engaged me from the start and was lyrical, almost poetic at times. So, even though I ended up reading parts again I enjoyed each reading. An engaging novel showing a microcosm of civilization as it is.
Fall Asleep Forgetting was a prize to read, the only drawback is you can’t read it in bits and pieces, but more as a whole. I give this book four stars. ( )

This book was a very good read even if in a few places it was a little confusing and the ending left me wondering what was going to happen to a couple of the characters....namely 'Six' and 'Cherry'...will Six ever understand what she's done, or for that matter will others...does Cherry get her love back...looking forward to Ms. Packard's next book... ( )