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Summary
Summary
A gripping and deftly plotted narrative of family and belonging, Lights All Night Long is a dazzling debut novel from an acclaimed young writer
"A luminous debut. . . . It's hard not to read the book in a single sitting."-- The Los Angeles Times
" Lights All Night Long is utterly brilliant and completely captivating. . . . One of the most propulsive, un-put-downable literary novels I've read in ages."-- Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new world--the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions--is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him.
But all is not right in Ilya's world: he's consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilya's dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown. The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their town's seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the town's usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison.
With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimir's innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimir's descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect him--a truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind.
A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fitzpatrick's glittering debut tells the story of how 15-year-old Ilya's wildest dream-going to America-is shattered by his worst nightmare: doing it without his older brother. Ilya, a gifted Russian teen in Berlozhniki, so impresses his English teacher Maria that she pins on him her hopes, and the hopes of the town: that he will pass an exam allowing him to go on exchange to America for a year. Having passed the exam, Ilya flies to live with the Mason family in Louisiana in 2008, but his thoughts are still at home, where his older brother, Vladimir, is in jail for the murders of young women that Ilya knows he didn't commit-but to which Vladimir has confessed. Ilya struggles to adjust to American life as he works to prove his brother's innocence, looking online for information about what the three murdered girls have in common and eventually piecing together enough clues to lead him to a shocking discovery. He is helped by Sadie, the Masons' blunt oldest daughter, a high school freshman, who is dealing with her own family secrets. The murder mystery is intricate and well-crafted, but the highlight is the relationship between the two brothers-the shy brainiac and the charming addict-and in the smoldering, seething resentment felt by young people. This is a heartbreaking novel about the lengths to which people go to escape their own pain, and the prices people are willing to pay to alleviate the suffering of their loved ones. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Devoted brothers, living a world apart, are enmeshed in a mystery.Making a poised, graceful literary debut, Fitzpatrick follows the aspirations and anguish of Ilya, a 15-year-old Russian exchange student who arrives in the U.S. burdened by worry about his older brother. After confessing to the murders of three young women, Vladimir is in prison, awaiting a harsh sentence; but Ilya is certain of his innocence, and although he is thousands of miles away, he sets out to prove it. Moving between the small town of Leffie, Louisiana, where Ilya is housed with the Masons, a pious, middle-class host family, and Berlozhniki, a former mining town where he shared a tiny apartment with his mother, grandmother, and brother, Fitzpatrick underscores the contrast between Western excess and Russian impoverishment. On the road to Leffie, Ilya whizzes past grocery stores"the shelves were completely full," he notices with amazementvideo stores, pizza places, gas stations, and a huge building shaped like a pyramid with two glass walls: the evangelical Star Pilgrim Church, where the Masons worship every Sunday. Their house is sprawling, with foyers, a den, multiple bathrooms and bedrooms, and a heated outdoor pool that, Ilya is shocked to see, can be illuminated for night swimming. Of the Masons' three daughters, only the sardonic Sadie, the eldest, seems to understand Ilya; as he soon discovers, she, like him, harbors secrets. He should not have been surprised, he reflects, "but his own secrets had made him myopic, made him forget that the world, even America, was a tangle of lives, all twisted and bent." Ilya confides in Sadie, sharing his worries: Vladimir's life, he reveals, is inexorably tangled. Unlike Ilya, who excelled academically, Vladimir struggled; he became a petty thief and drug addict, never keeping his promises that he would turn himself around. Beset with guilt, hoping desperately to save Vladimir, Ilya searches the internet for clues to the murders, and, with Sadie's help, he discovers the corruption and betrayal that landed Vladimir in prison.An absorbing tale imparted with tenderness and compassion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Russian high-school student Ilya arrives for a year of study in Baton Rouge, thanks to a cooperative agreement between the oil refinery in his small hometown and the one that dominates his new one. Overwhelmed, he at first pretends he can't speak English an untruth he soon replaces with another: he's grieving the death of his older brother, Vladimir. In reality, it's precisely Ilya's talent for English that earned his scholarship, and Vladimir is in prison for the murders of three women. Ilya doesn't believe Vladimir's confession, though, and his time in the U.S. is quickly overtaken by his growing attachment to his host parents' oldest daughter, and by his private search to uncover the true killer. This mystery drives the novel, as Fitzpatrick reconstructs Ilya's life in dramatically inhospitable Berlozhniki. While he, mild-mannered and serious, rose as a star student, his family's pride, boisterous Vladimir cut a different and dangerous path. Like the English-instruction tapes Ilya listens to as a kind of security blanket, the brothers' lifelong connection buzzes with the outbursts and feedback of real life; even in his absence, Vladimir controls Ilya's thoughts and feelings. Beyond the brothers' crystalline characterizations, Fitzpatrick gifts her intriguing debut with elegant prose, affecting images, and rich settings.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN literature were labeled like processed food, some novels would list Russian Mystique as an ingredient: a hint of ground-up Chekhov, a trace of Putin, some dirty snow from the Gulag, all marinated in the air of a communal apartment, and used to signify literary depth. Maria Kuznetsova's "Oksana, Behave!" and Lydia Fitzpatrick's "Lights All Night Long" both contain more than a bullion cube of this special artificial flavor. In an immigrant coming-of-age story, Oksana narrates her own life through a series of vignettes, beginning when she is 7 and leaves Kiev for Gainesville, Fla., with her family, and ending when she is in early adulthood. Kuznetsova's writing can take on a breezy, frenetic energy - she is good at sex scenes, drinking scenes and at describing impulsive action. Oksana's sexpot grandmother, Baba, is a remarkable character, and the depiction of Oksana's job as a content producer for a media startup is spot-on and hilarious. But the book is hampered by an awkward, self-conscious sprinkling of that Russian Mystique. Here is a very drunk Oksana, at a party in Manhattan: "Though I know I should be moved by the raspy lyrics of the rebel Russian bard Vysotsky or the Soviet rock my parents listened to during their final years together, nothing makes me feel more pain than a perfect pop song after a few drinks, when I am open to the world's ecstasy and horror, dancing like I have 10 arms and 10 legs and 10 different hearts for breaking." The awkward Russian references sound jerry-built in an otherwise fun, multi-limbed sentence. Plotwise, a novel about a woman in her 20 s who, when seriously inebriated, contemplates her obligation to her parents' music taste is actually quite interesting. But Kuznetsova never explores Oksana's motivations: For a story told in the first person, "Oksana, Behave!" is remarkably introspection-free. Oksana appears detached from her own feelings and actions, as if watching herself from a distance. This approach works well in childhood scenes, her sense of bewilderment and dislocation authentic to the early immigrant experience. And when teenage Oksana suffers a loss, this distant, nihilistic tone is an effective expression of grief. But as she ages, the protagonist never evolves, continuing to narrate her self-destructive life in the same curmudgeonly voice, devoid of insight. The novel as a result is both action-packed and tedious, its language slipping easily into rote clichés, as when Oksana tells her grandmother, "I'm in love with a married man. He's leaving his wife for me." Baba tritely replies, "You're still young, why get involved in such a mess? If I were you, I would run in the other direction." Oksana: "But you're not me. You don't feel what I feel." As a Ph.D. student studying Chekhov, she quotes his short story "The Lady With the Dog," about an adulterous couple - or, more precisely, about a cynic who is blindsided by an accidental discovery of profound human connection. There's no such discovery in store for Oksana. It never becomes clear why she falls in love with Roman, whose character is sketched even more indifferently than the rest of her romantic interests. Oksana seems primarily attracted to his Russian Mystique - he's a second-generation Russian-American, and a fellow student of literature. By the time Oksana ultimately betrays him, the reader is waiting for the monotonous lineup of her various flings to end. "Lights All Night Long" is in many ways the opposite of "Oksana, Behave!" Where Kuznetsova's novel is slight and noncommittal, Fitzpatrick's is solid and deliberate. Its chapters, set alternatingly in Russia and America, carry its mysterious plot to a satisfying resolution like an army of obedient soldiers following orders. Ilya, a 15-year-old exchange student from a Russian town called Berlozhniki, moves to a Louisiana town called Leffie where he is staying with a host family, the Masons. Back in Russia, Ilya's older brother, Vladimir, has been arrested for murder. Ilya is convinced Vladimir is innocent, and with the help of the Masons' daughter, Sadie, he sets out to prove it. The pair visit Gabe, an American Mormon who, upon his return home from his mission in Berlozhniki, built an intricate model of the town in his bedroom. Ilya peers into his own apartment window in the model, "half expecting to see his life there as it had been ... but the windows were opaque." Reading "Lights All Night Long" is a remarkably similar experience. The writing is often masterly, and contains vivid details: a cruelly slow-motion police chase, the care with which Vladimir's family tends his injuries; Sadie's silver spray-painted sneakers. But Fitzpatrick is so fond of narrative symmetry, neat metaphors and redundant parallels that her characters, caged in these airtight constructions, fail to come alive. Ilya is the good brother - a gifted student, he learns English with the help of a dedicated and selfless teacher who eventually arranges his passage to America. Vladimir is the troublemaker with a heart of gold, who drops out of school and becomes an addict. The teacher and her policeman husband become neatly embedded in this tragic yin-and-yang. Ilya's exchange trip is sponsored by a partnership between a Russian oil company, where his mother works, and its American counterpart, the Masons' employer. The oil pipeline becomes a metaphor for familial bonds: Ilya touches the pipe in Leffie and imagines that it links him to his brother. And yet, when Ilya eventually finds out that Sadie's biological mother is an addict, just like Vladimir, it's as if Fitzpatrick doesn't trust the subtler bonds she forges between characters without this forced parity. Vladimir is addicted to synthetic heroin called "krokodil." The motif makes a symbolic cameo as an ice sculpture of a crocodile ata Berlozhniki festival, before delivering its heavy-handed allegorical coup de grace as a real crocodile that has gotten into the Masons' swimming pool. Ilya is terrified, but his host mom reassures him: "Tiya, honey,' she said, 'an alligator can't climb over that wall.' " Fitzpatrick's America is a wonderful promised land for those who deserve it, with no metaphorical crocodiles getting past the wall. The Masons, devout churchgoers, may be a touch goofy, but they're kind, always selfless, never complicated. Perhaps this is because Fitzpatrick is not really interested in Leffie or its inhabitants. Her true passion is the fictional Berlozhniki, and she erects a perfect model of this dysfunctional Russian town. It has an old Gulag camp, a collapsed Soviet mine, the refinery, a bootleg video establishment called the Internet Kebab and a sinister oligarch - all of this liberally sprinkled with lots of snow and transliterated Russian words. Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick seems so concerned with the integrity of her setting, so preoccupied with finding for it the right shade of darkness, that she manipulates its inhabitants like plastic figures in an architectural model. Never allowing them to transcend their external plights, she instead supplants their individuality with a generous dose of Russian Mystique. In the acknowledgments, Fitzpatrick thanks Svetlana Alexievich for her book "Secondhand Time." The testimonies collected in this oral history - by individuals of different backgrounds and ages and post-Soviet perspectives - are quite chaotic, and contain weakness, complicated loves, bitterness, almost entirely without neat resolutions. "Lights All Night Long" reads like a streamlined, denatured and stretched-out version of one of Alexievich's stories - a 340-page monument to Fitzpatrick's fascination with Russia, solid yet unaffecting. As readers, we should examine what's in our books as discerningly as we do what's in our food. Find out what got ground up into Russian Mystique! Make "Lady With the Dog" your companion to "Oksana, Behave!" - it's less than 20 pages long. "Secondhand Time" is a brick, so perhaps just tackle some of its stories to get a taste of the real thing. And if you crave unflinchingly realistic fiction set in contemporary Russia, just spend 90 terrifying minutes streaming Episode 7 of "The Romanoffs." ANYA ULINICH is the author of the novel "Petropolis" and, most recently, the graphic novel "Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel."
