Day for Night: A Novel

by Frederick Reiken

Overview

"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems in fact to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it.

In Day For Night, critically acclaimed writer Frederick Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, and yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316077576
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/27/2011
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Frederick Reiken is the author of two previous novels, The Odd Sea (1998) and The Lost Legends of New Jersey (2000). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and his essays in the anthology Living on the Edge of the World (2008). He has worked as a reporter and columnist and is currently a member of the writing faculty at Emerson College.

What People are Saying About This

Margot Livesey

From the dazzling opening chapter of Day For Night, Frederick Reiken makes clear that the stakes for his characters, and for his readers, are nothing less than everything. Here is a world, our world, in which no-one gets to escape the net of history and no-one, finally, gets to deny their human connections. I held my breath while I watched Reiken assemble his own extraordinary minyan. (Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street, The Missing World, etc.)

Kevin Canty

Day for Night is beautiful, original, brilliant and swift. A novel that seems to be about everything, everywhere, yet wears its ambitions lightly and keeps hold of a strong, mysterious emotional core. I admired every page of it and can't wait to read it again. (Kevin Canty, author of Everything: A Novel, Where the Money Went, etc.)

Richard Russo

Day For Night does what really good books so often do by forcing us to see the familiar world in new ways that reveal its wonder. It's a nifty trick that not every writer can pull off. Frederick Reiken can and does. (Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic, Nobody's Fool,etc.)

Editorial Reviews

"Day for Night is a joy and a rare thing, a feast for the mind and the heart that almost demands a second reading."--Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Co./NPR

"A compelling tale in which one thread deftly connects 10 people....An imaginative and exciting read."--Publishers Weekly

"A thought-provoking, intricate portrait of the far-reaching, intergenerational implications of the Holocaust - and how fortuitous circumstances can bring people from both sides of a tragedy closer together, and, in some cases, further apart."--S. Kirk Walsh, Los Angeles Times

"An intricate, subtly fantastic, six-degrees-of-separation tale shaped by the beauty, continuity, and mystery of nature. . . . It's an entrancing and profoundly complicated tale Reiken tells as he slowly reveals the submerged connections among his intriguing characters while sustaining psychological sophistication, suspense, shrewd humor, and many-tiered compassion."--Booklist (starred)

"Brilliant plotting, haunting characters and an elegiac tone distinguish this dazzling novel by Reiken...Contemporary fiction at its best-accessible, breathtaking and heartbreaking."--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"This novel magically and eloquently links swimming with manatees in Florida with a comatose young man held hostage in Utah, a fugitive radical woman, and a kibbutz on the Dead Sea. It's beautifully written, magnificently cerebral, entirely compelling."-- Ellen Meeropol, Odyssey Bookshop

"What begins as a typical family drama becomes a chain reaction of plot twists. . . . . Day for Night is a beautiful test in patience, but by the end, you'll see it was worth the wait."--Very Short List

From the Publisher

Brilliant plotting, haunting characters and an elegiac tone distinguish this dazzling novel by Reiken (The Lost Legends of New Jersey, 2000, etc.). Criticized for his books' many plot coincidences, Charles Dickens claimed that those who don't notice coincidence in their lives simply don't have their eyes open. Reiken seems to hold similar views on concatenation, dexterously using "coincidence" to move his narrative from one relationship and place to another. The novel starts with David and Beverly, an unmarried but committed couple snorkeling around manatees in Florida. David's leukemia is in remission, but he wants Beverly to adopt his son if he should die. Beverly then links up with Tim, their "manatee scout," who's in a local band with vocalist Dee. The next part of the narrative follows Tim and Dee as they fly to Salt Lake City to visit Dee's brother Dillon, who's in a coma as the result of a motorcycle accident. Sitting next to them on the plane is a woman who turns out to be a fugitive (of sorts), a much-sought radical from the 1960s; FBI agents' pursuit of her becomes the next segment of the narrative. The following chapter presents the point of view of Jennifer, Beverly's brilliant but somewhat wayward daughter, on her mother's relationships. And so it goes. Reiken segues from character to character with remarkable virtuosity, grounding the narrative in several seemingly disparate but ultimately unifying topics, including the mass murder during World War II of 500 Jews (Beverly's father and uncle perhaps among them) and an Israeli soldier's abortive attempt to save a Palestinian boy from falling off a roof, an event that we learn later is connected to Dillon's motorcycle accident.While Reiken ties his narrative knots, he leaves them satisfyingly loose. Contemporary fiction at its best-accessible, breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Kirkus Reviews