Michael McGirr: The Lost Art of Sleep. Pan Macmillan Australia, 2009. ISBN: 9780330424912. RRP $32.99. Online
Review first published July 2009
It's hard to imagine Michael McGirr asleep. Easier to picture him nodding off because the movement of the head can be read as resistance to life's tedium. And we know what this gifted connoisseur of life's ironies thinks about tedium because he tells us. Staff meetings are not his cup of tea. Tutorials rarely galvanise him. Cant bores him to stupefaction. About sermons he maintains a stout scepticism — he once dozed off during one of his own.
Yet by nature McGirr seems so much more the avid magpie than the dormouse. Even when he confesses to curling up under his desk to have a post-lunch kip (I have seen him do this) you figure he's just closing his eyes the better to plot mischief, or give his racing brain a few horizontal minutes to organise and file the prodigious miscellany that might otherwise leak out and stain the carpet.
The Lost Art is mayhem and wisdom in one handbook — a disconcerting package, because it makes you anxious and glad at the same time. Anxious because sleep, or lack of it, obsesses all of us at one time or another, and the extremity of McGirr's personal sleep pathology (acute sleep apnoea), however comically told, is daunting because it makes us all feel vulnerable — there but for the grace of ...
He knows too well that we simply can't manage without sleep. Like water, it is essential (little wonder that sleep deprivation and water boarding have become the tortures of choice for our disarrayed times). But the book also makes one vehemently glad — glad at the prodigal generosity of the writing, its humanity, its lust for family (a very extended 'family') life in all its exhausting and patched variety, for its comic brio and its grace.
On one page you can enjoy McGirr's zany scholarship (never waste a Jesuit education). He'll tell you that the word 'mortgage', from the French, means 'death grip', and the derivation makes mordant sense when you consider its context in the book: McGirr and his wife and young family of three in the clutches of the Melbourne real estate industry — an experience to rob one of more than sleep.
A few chapters on and you are reading bedtime pirate stories with McGirr's