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Jessica Keener’s debut novel, Night Swim, is glorious.

This finely-layered novel is told from the perspective of the bright, 16-year-old Sarah Kunitz. Through her eyes, we are offered an intimate look at her upper middle class family in 1970 suburban Boston. It’s an enviable portrait from the outside, but behind closed doors it is a darkly different story. Sarah’s mother is taking pills and floundering.  Sarah and her brothers must find ways to escape their parents’ bitter disagreements and their father’s difficult personality. Those harsh realities are soon replaced with confusion, grief and anger when their mother dies in a car crash. A certain drifting sadness looms while their father begins an affair with a young woman and Sarah embarks on her own romances.  Consequences abound, but Keener weaves the threads into a taut ending.

The novel carries with it the full implications of its title. What is a night swim?  It’s moving into dark waters with little illumination to guide us, trusting – without certain reason to –that we will be able to navigate the muck, the humming currents, the chilly viscosity, and emerge intact. When we close the book, we know that Sarah is not going to merely survive; she is going to thrive. This is a deep exploration of the Kunitz family, and our own humanity, that will resonate long after you have finished reading.

Keener is a big talent with a particular knack for detail and a finely tuned ear. Through the skilled rendering she offers of this family and the characters who surround them, she gives us a story that makes us cringe and lurch, laugh and, literally, weep. Her writing is never obvious, yet her lyrical prose will wow you. Even when describing the seemingly ordinary, Keener injects poetry. Sentences like these kiss every page of the novel:

“By now it was pitch-black outside and the large globe light above the table reflected off the windows like a bloated fish.”

“Her flower heads had turned brown, her petals wrinkled as old peoples’ faces”

Not every writer has the ability to move readers the way Keener does. Her writing is richly textured and she strikes perfect pitch with Sarah. We are swept into the world of a teenager on every page, including plenty of squirmy and self-conscious moments.  It is a high-wire act to give authentic voice to a teenager of a different era, but Kenner never stumbles. She is particularly adept at handling Sarah’s sex life in a realistic manner, capturing so much of the awkwardness inherent in teen sexuality, including birth control and Planned Parenthood.  Sarah comes alive as a realistic navigator and takes us along on a rich exploration of family life and coming into one’s own.  Sarah’s moment in time echoes the nation’s 1970 zeitgeist – pent up, poised for and on the verge of great change. Keener does a brilliant job lacing bits of music and other cultural signposts of the times – Woodstock, the lyrics to “If I Had A Hammer” — into the narrative, keeping us firmly rooted in the era without bombarding us with it.

There is much feeling in this novel, yet the writing never becomes precious or sentimental. It aches with suffering and shimmers with strength. Sarah’s explorations allow readers to examine their own relationship with truth, sorrow, loss, longing and joy.  Sarah gives us a careful look at something we all tend to do – rush past pain – and teaches us to keep hold of our true selves no matter how we might veer.

Readers will be glad they dove into Night Swim.

Anna March writes our monthly Empowering/Embarrassing column as well as the weekly Aural Fixations column at The Rumpus. She has been nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Salon, Connotation Press and other publications. Her novel, The Diary of Suzanne Frank, is forthcoming. You can keep up with her on Facebook.

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 2:00 am and is filed under guest contributors, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Feel free to leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.