She is a special kind of magical realist in that she is wholly committed to both registers. You will be reading it for the pleasure of Russell’s language, which is acrid, luminous, and deft, and for the way she confuses the ordinary and the marvelous. Not that you will be reading Sleep Donation for the plot or even for the themes. Most of our time is spent asking strangers for donations.” During sex, an exchange that occurs, for Trish, in minutes and concludes with a quick “thank you,” she reflects: “This is our training.
(People don’t always credit how grim this author can be, but to read Russell is to realize that you can have invention without joy.) Behind the playful deployment of epidemiological jargon lies Trish’s grief over the loss of Dori: “Sometimes I think the right doctor could open my chest and find her there … frozen inside of me, like a face in a locket.” And beneath the ingenuity that calls sunshine “the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning,” is a dread that human relationships have become too transactional to mean anything. Instead it is signature Russell: a fanciful, droll, elaborately thought-through allegory with a dark center. This sounds like a lot of plot-I’ve yet to mention the two sinister Irish brothers who originally made their fortune in ergonomic toilets-but it doesn’t feel that way.
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