Writing on "the general character of novels" in his essay On English Prose Fiction, Anthony Trollope expressed the belief that "love stories are their mainstay and the staff of their existence. . . . The love story is the thing."
This is a message that Rebecca Dinerstein brilliantly exemplifies in her rich and often surprising debut novel. In The Sunlit Night the mechanics of the love story are not conventional, and the protagonists' path towards love is awkward, hesitant, and unsure until, to quote the anglicised Norwegian phrase in the novel, "they became happy in each other."
Dinerstein, who is 26 and based in Brooklyn, spent a year on a fellowship on an island in the Norwegian North Sea. She takes what might be considered a foregone love plot but shows a distinctive talent in her painting of character and setting, and in her articulation of the intense human need not so much for romance and marriage as for contact, communion, love and belonging.
She does so through the initially distinct but gradually interweaved stories of its two beguiling protagonists. Yasha Gregoriov is the 17-year-old only son of a Russian immigrant to New York. His part is told in the third person. Frances is a 21-year-old New Yorker whose first-person narrative describes her being callously dumped by her high-flying boyfriend.
The narrative goes on to tell of her estrangement from her selfish, unhappy, quarrelsome and divorce-bound parents, with whom she has grown up in an impossibly small apartment. Further drama is provided by her younger sister’s unexpected engagement, which her parents strongly oppose.
Small wonder that Frances chooses to take refuge as an apprentice painter to a Norwegian artist in a remote colony called Lofoten, where they work on a huge outdoor installation in yellow. Yasha, whom she meets, has also been dumped.
If anything Yasha has drawn an even shorter straw when it comes to family. His attractive and socially sophisticated mother arranged to follow Yasha and his modest, hardworking baker father, Vassily, to New York from Russia but sent them off and for 10 years was nowhere to be found.
Thus abandoned, father and son set up home in her absence and live in a tentative harmony above the father’s new Brighton Beach bakery. Vassily eventually plans a trip to Russia in search of his estranged wife, only to be handed divorce papers by his brother on arrival. Already suffering from a weak heart, the shock kills him, and Yasha is left to organise the funeral his father has requested – “at the top of the world” in Norway.
So, by circuitous routes, Yasha and Frances find themselves and eventually each other in the remote Lofoten, each attempting to come to terms with a form of familial dysfunction and abandonment, both in huge need of companionship.
All of which might seem outlandish were in not for the underlying truth at the heart of the tale, which emerges in the extraordinarily captivating narrative voices that Dinerstein conjures up.
The first half hops and skips along, often lyrical, often darkly funny. The second half becomes even more fragmented and sometimes, like the faltering relationships it describes, risks puttering to an untimely halt. Patience is required of the reader akin to that of Yasha and Frances, who slowly reach out from their splintered selves and eventually find each other.
All this is told against the extraordinary backdrop of sun-filled, endless Norwegian days, of the unique and striking colours that seep out and shine through Dinerstein’s vibrant, precise, sun-splashed prose.
This poetic novel is beautifully paced, leaving the reader wishing to hurry it along even more quickly so Frances and Yasha can finally be brought together. Striking, too, is the novel’s unfussy focus on the difficulties of family, the sometimes impossible striving for acceptance, not to mention love, the callous self-centredness of parents who fail to create a workable version of home for their children.
This is a compassionate novel in which learning to be alone is a vital step that both must take before they can be together. Telephones and Skype seem to aid only the severing of ties. It is a simple, old-fashioned letter that sets their uncertain future.
John McCourt's latest book is Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland
