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A review by eleanorfranzen
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
I requested this because, you know, Adam Foulds, but I wasn't expecting to like it nearly as much as I did. It's the story of two people: one, Henry, is an up-and-coming actor who's about to break out of the TV period drama circuit with a starring role in a film by a major director; the other, Kirstin, is an American divorcée who bumped into him at an airport a year ago, and who has since been consumed by the delusion that they are meant to be together. It's not anything like the last Foulds novel I read (The Quickening Maze, about the institutionalization of the poet John Clare in the same asylum as Tennyson's brother Septimus). Foulds is exceptionally talented at putting us inside Henry's and Kirstin's heads; his insights into the acting industry, particularly into the world of cinema and celebrity, auditioning and waiting to hear back, are brilliant and convincing. Henry's permanent semi-conscious awareness of his body—hunger, muscle, fasting, lightness, the unusually beautiful structure of the bones of his face—is especially well rendered. In the sections involving Kirstin, meanwhile, Foulds climbs into her head such that we not only see her madness, but understand it, intimately; her divorce has cost her a young stepson and the loss of his small, innocent love is something that she keeps coming back to, a hole in her heart that her obsession with Henry cannot fill. The story clearly can't end well, but Foulds shows tremendous restraint right up to the finish line. Dream Sequence is very good, and very hard to pigeonhole.