Night Swim

by Jessica Keener

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER. Sixteen-year-old Sarah Kunitz lives in a posh, suburban world of 1970 Boston. From the outside, her parents' lifestyle appears enviable - a world defined by cocktail parties, expensive cars, and live-in maids to care for their children - but inside their five-bedroom house, all is not well for the Kunitz family. Coming home from school, Sarah finds her well-dressed, pill-popping mother lying disheveled on their living room couch. At night, to escape their parents' arguments, Sarah and her oldest brother, Peter, find solace in music, while her two younger brothers retreat to their rooms and imaginary lives.  Any vestige of decorum and stability drains away when a family tragedy occurs one terrible winter day. Soon after, their father, a self-absorbed, bombastic professor, begins an affair with a younger colleague. Sarah, aggrieved, dives into two summer romances that lead to unforeseen consequences. In a story that will make you laugh and cry, Night Swim shows how a family, bound by heartache, learns to love again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611883503
Publisher:	Gramarye Media
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Edition description:	10th Anniversary Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.88(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Jessica Keener's writing career was launched when her story "Recovery" won second prize in Redbook's fiction contest. Her work has since been recognized in The Pushcart Prize under Outstanding Writers and has appeared in numerous publications. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant and was a finalist for Bread Loaf's Bakeless Literary Prize. Her debut novel, Night Swim, has was widely praised by reviewers and book bloggers and was followed by the collection Women in Bed and the novel Strangers in Budapest. Her feature articles have appeared in the Boston Globe; O, The Oprah Magazine, Coastal Living, Design New England, and other national publications.

Editorial Reviews

An amazing new literary voice, Jessica Keener explores the fine-laced network of tangled familial relations in language both bold and intricate. Night Swim is the deeply moving and devastatingly beautiful work of a fearless writer.

Sarah Gruen

Jessica Keener steps boldly into the terrain of Eugene O’Neill, conjuring up the pathologies and quirks of a besieged Boston family in stark, quivering detail that never entirely distracts us from the looming sense of crisis. This gripping first novel announces the arrival of a strong, distinct and fully evolved new voice.

Jennifer Egan

Keener’s observations perfectly capture a certain kind of 1970s adolescence: the adults who tried too hard, the sudden appearance of a joint when in the presence of older cousins, the way a grownup party could spin from fun to disturbing in a blink. Most exhilaratingly, she taps into the thrilling moments when a girl of 16 can see her future, whether in music or books or a boy’s smile.

The Boston Globe

Rooted in personal sorrow, this memorable debut will strike a universal chord with readers: ‘Life was full of befores and afters.’

Booklist

Like the adults in Rick Moody’s Ice Storm, the central couple in this novel of 1970s suburbia are remote alcoholics. ‘Love was something distant that retired to a room on the second floor,’ Sarah, the 16-year-old narrator, says, referring to her stay-at-home yet absentee mother. This is a woman who makes a divot in the soil for her drink glass while tending her roses ... This earnest debut centers on Sarah as she tunnels through new depths of loneliness ... moving.

The New York Times

Keener understands deeply that scene writing creates powerful moments for her characters. We learn of Sarah’s irritation, fear, reticence, and desire not through discussion, but through her actions and interactions with others. And Keener’s writing is lovely; she manages to build sentences that are both precise and ornate. While Keener’s Night Swim tells of a girl who has lost her bearings, her hold on her novel is both assured and poised.

Jewish Book Council

Keener's debut novel is a coming-of-age story that begins, like so many remembrances, with a voice from the past—middle-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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Keener’s debut novel tells the story of a Jewish teenager, Sarah, who is looking back from the present to her 1970s adolescence. While her story follows the predictable path of a teenager who acted out after the death of her mother, it’s full of emotion and depth that the listener can identify with. Rachel Botchan narrates in an even, neutral voice. This approach captures the perspective of the adult Sarah but not the drama of her teenage years. Furthermore, it doesn’t engage listeners with the loneliness of the teenager as she seeks love and acceptance outside her family. Botchan provides some variation in her reading, most notably in the childish tones of Sarah’s troubled mother. While Botchan clearly conveys Sarah’s story, her reading lacks the spark that would make this story hard to walk away from. E.N. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2012 - AudioFile