Night Swim

April 16, 2012
Keener's debut novel is a coming-of-age story that begins, like so many remembrances, with a voice from the pastâmiddle-aged Sarah Kunitz is married with three grown children, but is called back to her own childhood when an unexpected email arrives from Mickey Fineburg, the boy she kissed under a broken pool table at age eight. The majority of the novel comprises vivid vignettes wherein Sarah recalls being a teenager in 1970s upper-class suburban Boston, the only daughter among three brothers. When Sarah's mother tragically dies in a car crash, the young protagonist is prematurely propelled into adulthood and its concomitant dramas of sex, self-discovery, and coping with inevitable loss. While each chapter feels self-sufficient, their loose ordering lends a dreamlike quality to the novel, appropriate for a recollection begun at a "deep hour" of night, when time "doesn't follow lines but circles and dips into underwater caves." Though occasionally belabored by grander themes for the most part left unexplored (e.g., Sarah's Jewish heritage and brushes with anti-Semitism), as well as unbalanced language (compare the weirdly comic description of a sexual encounter as "a quick, slippery ride" with the poetically strange notion of the sun resembling a fetus), Keener's evocation of a young woman coming into her own is nevertheless moving.

December 15, 2011
When her mother is killed in a car accident, Sarah, 16, lives in a cavity of pain, and each chapter in this eloquent first novel captures the teen's anger, guilt, loneliness, and sorrow at her wrenching loss. Part of a Jewish family in a rich 1970s Boston neighborhood, she is not into politics, uninterested in Nixon and Vietnam, not much bothered by the occasional dirty Jew slur she hears at school. She likes comics and music and her gorgeous classmate Anthony. What does enrage her is Dad's relationship with his new girlfriend. Always true to the teen's viewpoint, the spare prose will hold readers as Sarah fights with her brothers, bonds with the housekeeper, tries to blame her dad for the accident (why did he let Mama drive alone?), and deals with her first sexual relationship. Rooted in personal sorrow, this memorable debut will strike a universal chord with readers: Life was full of befores and afters. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)