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Happily Married, Politically at Peace. Until a Run for Congress Gets in the Way.
In her lively debut novel, “How to Sleep at Night,” Elizabeth Harris measures what happens when the Republican half of a gay couple dials up the campaign rhetoric.
HOW TO SLEEP AT NIGHT, by Elizabeth Harris
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.
