Feckless, nervous, irresolute, often troubled with insomnia, Nona longs for a life of firm purpose, order, and dignity. To do whatever is the work before her, letting nothing distract her, expecting nothing, fearing nothing - the way of the Stoics - this is her ideal. But despite all her stratagems, this ideal constantly eludes her. Life is too unpredictable, her sense of self too fragile, and human and relationships are too tenuous. She muddles along, a victim of her own anxieties and resentments, her behavior often as mystifying to herself as it is to others. Why, though happily married, does she fly across the country to pursue a man she hardly knows, whom she intuitively mistrusts and does not even much care for? In the aftermath of this calamity, Nona separates from her husband and undergoes a period of intense self-examination. Meanwhile, she struggles to complete a book about her father, a painter, who died when she was a child. Out of both projects, her work of introspection and her work of memory, arise thorny questions about love, identity, and destiny. Unexpected support appears in the form of one of the her father's old lovers, whom Nona now meets for the first time. But while this new friendship thrives, relations between Nona and her husband, and between Nona and her mother, with whom she shares an anguished history, seem to be coming apart. Nona has barely achieved a somewhat surer sense of herself and her way in the world when a series of grave, unforeseeable events threaten her precarious equilibrium. Naked Sleeper is about the inescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama. It is the story of a woman's search for self-knowledge, for understanding of others, and for an answer to the imperative question: How should she live? The analytical musings of an unhappy life are the focus of Sigrid Nunez's second novel. The protagonist is a 40-year-old New Yorker named Nona who thinks too much of and about herself. She ruins a perfectly decent marriage for a lousy affair and then wonders where she went wrong. She has other concerns, both past and present, that create pictures of one woman and--through her eyes--of those around her. Nunez has produced a lovely novel reminiscent of her first work, A Feather on the Breath of God (HarperCollins, 1994), in its evocative style. A teacher in New York City happily married to Roy, Nona is writing a book aimed at recapturing the father who deserted her as a child. At the same time, she must contend with a larger-than-life mother and a man named Lyle who sends her importuning letters proclaiming his undying love. At a retreat on the estate of her friend Phoebe, whose father was her artist father's mentor, anxious, insomniac Nona begins to face up to the terrible wound created by her father's indifference, the humiliation of feeling "tainted" around her closed-lip relatives, and the mystery of her father's death. She runs off with Lyle, separates from Roy ("How could you?" says her exasperated mother), and begins to find peace. The result is a thoughtful, nicely nuanced work that goes down easily. For popular collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Nunez's second novel is even more resonant than her first, A Feather on the Breath of God (1994). A riveting psychological drama, it is structured like a spiral staircase, and each twist grants you a new and surprising vista. Nona, attractive and happily married, is working on a book about her father. She was told, as a child, that Shep, a painter, left his wife and daughter to devote himself to art, but the truth was that he was gay, a closely guarded secret that estranged Nona from both parents and left her unwilling to have a family of her own. Her kind husband wants children and is being patient, but Nona, an insomniac with self-destructive tendencies, gets involved with another man, a dreadful fellow, then moves out. As Nunez adroitly traces the convolutions of Nona's psyche and the consequences of her actions, she introduces terrific auxiliary characters and illuminates a full spectrum of emotions, emphasizing our ability to heal and proceed, strengthened by our ordeals. Donna Seaman The promise Nunez revealed in her acclaimed 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, is here fulfilled and magnified, as she follows the struggles of a woman to know her father and understand herself, labors that imperil her once secure marriage. Nona, little loved as a child and a pill-dependent insomniac as an adult, has found a measure of happiness hitherto unknown in her five-year marriage to Roy, with whom she shares a love of music and New York City life. Trouble erupts, however, during a monthlong visit to a friend's country estate, to which she retreats to work on a book about her father--an artist long dead, but out of her life even before that--when she meets brooding, handsome English prof Lyle and inexplicably finds herself open