Many book critics experience burnout. For the months preceding my recent return to the reviewing stage, I believe I was finally getting a taste of that occupational hazard. I was reading — I never, ever stop reading — but I couldn’t summon up anything to say about the books I read.
At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself. In reality, each time I read a review written by someone else of a book I’d loved (or loathed!), I would think “Oh yes! But what about this scene? You weren’t skeptical of that character?” And so on, and so forth.
I wasn’t lacking in things to say. I was lacking the energy to say them. Burnout.
Fortunately, that particular period of burnout is in the past. I knew this for sure when I finished reading Frederick Reiken’s “Day for Night” (Reagan Arthur Books) and found that my fingers almost itched to hit the keyboard and talk about it.
Here is a novel that defies description, yet makes the reader long to describe it; a narrative that breaks rules, yet ultimately follows them; it starts with one world, yet conjures another that is both too near and too far from our modern experience.
Reiken begins in contemporary Florida: A woman named Beverly, her boyfriend David, and David’s son Jordan are on a vacation in Homosassa, about to take a swim with manatees. (Most of the modern parts of the book are set during the mid-1980s, which seems odd at first but quickly assumes its time-sensitive importance.) On a whim, Beverly goes to listen to their dive guide’s band at a local bar, and he shares an odd, marvelous sight with her: A submerged merry-go-round.
That’s about all. The next chapter introduces us to new characters, including the dive guide’s sometime-girlfriend and band frontwoman, Dee. Ahhh, the reader thinks. A series of linked short stories. I’ve read books like this before. What will I learn about Dee? About Tim? What’s going on with her odd Utah family? Oh goody, a nice juicy horror tale about occult ritual abuse.
All wrong. It’s as if Reiken is re-layering an onion: The whole of the story will only be revealed by combining partially opaque, partially transparent layers filled with characters whose lives overlap both deliberately and serendipitously. Yet those layers truly do make up a whole. We know that Beverly spent her early childhood in Poland, and that fact is as important to the last few pages as it is to the first. Reiken accomplishes something quite elegant, usually only seen in the most puzzle-like mystery novels: He has a surprise (more than one, really) and he reveals it in his own time while never playing games with or attempting to trick the reader.
A few things can be told: This is essentially a book about the Holocaust. However, it is not a book that takes place during that horrific event, except for a few pages. It’s a book about the Holocaust’s reverberations — mostly bad, but a few good, because what interests Reiken is human connectedness, how each generation follows the many that have gone before, like so many horses on a carousel (that cover image is not an accident).
While each first-person chapter is compelling, I found something else equally so: Reiken’s use of natural locations, from marsh to ocean to Dead Sea to forest primeval. For his characters, whether male or female, old or young, recent or past, these places offer safety, renewal, and meaning. Those places are, of course, not wholly knowable. Since Reiken (who, as Julie Orringer noted in her Washington Post review, tips his hand early on about how we are all interconnected but may not know it) is playing with linear narrative, to understand “Day for Night,” readers have to abandon being able to know everything. We have to surrender and trust in Reiken’s vision.
Of course, his characters are in the same position – except that they don’t always have anyone to trust. Is God there? Or are other people all we have? Ultimately, this is a huge question that Reiken takes on in an inventive, beautiful, and relevant way. “Day for Night” is a novel that will win awards. More important, it’s a novel that should be read.
