Book Review: "Night Swim" by Jessica Keener

Reviewed by Joan Hanna

“The bright moon gleamed on the wooden floors and made my floor melt and become liquid as a pond. I invented songs. In this universe away from my father's explosions and mother’s thin voice … I sang to the moon, the hall light, and my memory of the honey summer light when the low sun slunk into my room in warm weather. I hummed. I changed my notes from high to low. I rolled them on my tongue. Singing was like eating. It filled a hungry feeling.” (page 27)

Night Swim by Jessica Keener (January 2012) is a witty, intriguing and sometimes sad coming of age story about sixteen-year-old Sarah Kunitz. The book is set in suburbia 1970s Boston and from all outward appearances Sarah's family and lifestyle, seemingly enviable by many, holds dark secrets behind lush walls. Keener takes her readers deftly into the inner workings of her sixteen-year-old lead character who is desperately trying to find her way at a school where she feels like an outcast, in a family that is caught up in its own drama, and amid the confusion and questions that any sixteen-year-old would ask about the world.

Sarah is caught between her father, Leonard, a “tenured professor at a small, private college, who rarely modulated his voice between podium and pantry” (page 19), her mother, Irene, who "moved without gravity, a cumulative effect of her pain pills, the one she took three times a day … Scotch with a twist of lime and two ice cubes” (page 19), and her three brothers: Elliott, submerged in his world of ceramic animals, Peter, the oldest rebellious one, and Robert, the sensitive truth teller.

While Sarah's family and friends at school at times seem larger than her own life, Sarah is the character in this book that you will be most drawn to. Somehow out of the detachment of her father and the overly critical disapproval of her mother, Sarah begins to emerge with the impressive qualities of the woman she will one day become. Her experimentation is at once tentative and willful but as you read through this book, Sarah takes everything on--from her mother's accidents, to her father's explosive anger, to the confusion and refuge of children trying to make sense of what happens in the contentious adult world around them--with a grace that will endear her to you.

One of the things that really struck me while reading this book is that Keener manages to tell the story of an emerging almost post-adolescent girl in a way that allows us to see her thought processes, emotional confusion, and, most importantly, her instinct to not only survive but rise above everything that her family and school cliques put her through.

And although Sarah’s foray into music begins through the influence of her brother, Peter, as they sit in a bedroom to escape their parents’ arguments, she soon begins to take that experience and fashion it into something of her own. Even when Sarah's decisions seem impulsive and reckless, one always gets the sense that she knows exactly what she's in for and what she assumes she will get out of each experience; even when those experiences prove to have unforeseen and life changing consequences.

Night Swim is a story of a girl saddled with a detached, overbearing and self-indulgent family, and plunged into the middle of biased and hurtful schoolmates, and emotionally detached boyfriends. Keener has reached into the center of an unlikely sixteen-year-old heroine and gives her readers an insider view into the polishing of a gem readied for womanhood. Keener's main character Sarah will thrill you, she will worry you, and, at times, frustrate you, but she will also seem as familiar to you as a distant memory within your own past.