Day for Night

Day for Night
by Frederick Reiken
Little, Brown, 2010. 326 pgs. Fiction.

Such an unusual book, but good. Ten narrators tell a story that begins with Beverly Rabinowitz, a Holocaust survivor who fled Poland as a child and who, as the novel begins, is with her dying boyfriend David in Florida. She and her family swim with the manatees in the river, guided by a young man named Tim Birdsey who travels with the lead singer from his garage band to Salt Lake City where her brother lies in a coma after a motorcycle accident in Israel. They are questioned by the FBI because they were sitting next to a woman on the plane who is suspected of being part of a radical/terrorist group in the sixties, but who seems to have mystical powers and who can appear and disappear at will. With a less skilled writer, pandemonium might result, but Reiken takes his characters and readers firmly in hand and delivers a luminous "six degrees of separation" story where people, circumstances, landscapes, and experiences that seem disparate beyond reconciliation combine at last into a lovely, satisfying close. (Some sexual situations and language.)

LW