In an Isolated Landscape, ‘The Sunlit Night’ Reaffirms Human Connection

“Some people claim that life is not making love to them… I thought: one must want to make love to life,” muses Frances, one of the protagonists in Rebecca Dinerstein’s thoughtful debut novel, “The Sunlit Night.” Echoing this sentiment, Yasha, the novel’s other protagonist, questions the claims that “some people” make about life. Frances and Yasha also both take action when, through no fault of their own, their lives become challenging and stressful. Set against a backdrop of a remote island in the Far North, the novel follows the pair as they not only take solace in one another but also strive “to make love to life,” messy though it may be. Dinerstein artfully arranges her language in simple yet touching sentences throughout “The Sunlit Night,” and, in doing so, she masterfully explores the tentative love between these two grieving strangers.

Dinerstein opens the novel with the two disparate yet equally powerful backstories, priming the reader to meditate on Frances’s and Yasha’s acute loneliness. Stifled by her parents in a Manhattan apartment and jilted by her college beau, Frances decides to escape to an artist colony on Lofoten, an archipelago off the coast of Norway. Aside from previously learning about the colony’s only artist, Nils, Frances has little to justify her flight except her desire to leave her parents and their bickering about her sister’s impending marriage behind. “Maybe I could learn something about the world’s brightness from that man [Nils] and his yellow paint,” Frances thinks, initially more to reassure herself than from genuine excitement about the trip. “Maybe I could learn to be alone.” Across the East River in Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Yasha also feels alone. Abandoned by his mother, he and his Russian immigrant father, Vassily, run a bakery in Brighton Beach until Vassily dies from heart failure. Out of place in the city and now without a family, Yasha travels to Lofoten because Vassily wished “to be buried at the top of the world.” Leaving behind their separate New York City experiences—and the places and faces associated with their painful memories—ultimately does not guarantee Frances and Yasha relief from their own problems. Instead, Dinerstein uses this escaping-one’s-life structure to create a logical path which leads the two to connect in Lofoten.

Throughout the novel, Dinerstein’s simple language packs a punch, highlighting the characters’ believable motivations to leave their dysfunctional homes and to learn how to deal with themselves. When Yasha works at the bakery after his father has died, for example, he simply goes through the motions of day-to-day activities without connecting to his life in the present: “Saturday. Swarm of bagel customers, dearth of poppy seeds, Vassily’s pants drenched in a bowlful of spilled eggs, Yasha’s shoes untied, Yasha’s shoelaces dragging through the egg yolks, the cat licking the floor all morning, Vassily many times kicking the cat, Vassily apologizing, talking to the cat, frightening the customers. The customers, usual. The Danishes, a little sour. No mother, no mother, no mother.” Alone and in pain, Yasha makes observations but does not log them in his brain. And he certainly does not connect with others. Dinerstein draws out this theme of isolation throughout the novel, and her choice to do so ultimately works in setting the stage for events that follow.

Dinerstein’s lyrical prose first focuses on Frances and Yasha independently as they struggle with their own issues and long for a change of scene. Indeed, in Lofoten the two do not meet right away. Frances arrives several weeks before Yasha and has time to acclimate to the people-less island and to her patchwork routine in a local artist colony under the direction of Nils. But thinking about being alone and actually being alone do not prove to be the same. Dinerstein here uses curt, charged sentences to illustrate Frances’s budding discovery that being by herself is not all that she hoped it would be: “‘Where are you going?’ [Frances] said. ‘Town,’ [Nils] said. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Town,’ [Frances] said, thrilled that there was such a place.” Without extraneous description or explanation of each word spoken, Dinerstein crafts distinct characters and carefully shapes their personalities throughout the novel in many similar exchanges. More than the characters’ actions, the conversations here speak for themselves.

A tight read, “The Sunlit Night” delves into Frances’s and Yasha’s individual thought processes and actions rather than the exact words they say. Giving her characters breathing room, Dinerstein peppers the novel with punchy one-liners, bursting with stripped-down, unpretentious insight. Take, for example, one of Frances’s and Yasha’s first encounters, where only one full sentence passes between the two. What comes out seems trivial, but Dinerstein shows that the deeper feelings reside realistically in their heads: “‘What’s your name?’ Yasha asked. ‘Frances,’ she said. She didn’t seem to have any interest in him…. He had nothing in particular to say to her, but he wanted to keep her attention—her level, undemanding attention.” Yasha’s churning thoughts are weightier than what he asks Frances. The unspoken words make his question all the more poignant. In the silence between them, Frances and Yasha learn to lean on one another, even if doing so means that they must at times be apart.

At one point, Frances overthinks what her future with Yasha might look like. Dinerstein, however, succeeds in making sure such big-picture musings do not feel cliché: “If we both go back to New York, will we be going back together?” Frances thinks to herself, imagining Yasha’s voice taking over her restless mind. “If I am younger than you for the rest of my life, will you get older, and older, and older?” With these “what ifs” of life, Dinerstein skillfully paints a picture of two young people who have left it all behind to figure it out on their own. In a powerful—albeit expected—turn of events, Frances and Yasha realize that “to make love to life” they need one another. “The Sunlit Night” ultimately triumphs because of this no-frills premise, which Dinerstein uses effectively to strike an emotional chord.

—Staff writer Melissa C. Rodman can be reached at melissa.rodman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @melissa_rodman.