Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302140257
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by MATTHEW CHITTUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WORKING ALL NIGHT IN AMERICA
A DAY IN THE NIGHT OF AMERICA. By Kevin Coyne. Random House. $22.All the American geographic frontiers, it seems, have been exhausted, and so have a good many of the topical frontiers for writing. But both we fitful, fidgety Americans and Kevin Coyne have found new ground to explore: the night.
Coyne's first book is ingenious and, frankly, enviable in its very idea. It's an exploration of life after dark, an homage to those who sweat while most of us sleep, to those restless folks who work through the night at a seemingly endless variety of jobs.
Coyne's prose is, at times, vibrant, particularly in the introduction, a pulsing tribute to the absence of light as the newest frontier in America. The text of the book is a nocturnal trek across the United States, with visits to a notably diverse pack of day-sleeping, night-toiling, biologically backward pioneers of the darkness, from herring fishermen in New England to foreign currency traders at Citibank in New York; from students at the all-night Dunkin' Donuts baking school in Boston to the doughnut-consuming night shift cops in Times Square; and from Washington, D.C., weather watchers to Coyne himself.
The myriad stories here are decorated with historical perspectives on the night - Greek and Roman views of it, for example, or the fact that Duke Ellington composed by early-morning lamplight. Unfortunately, these occasional looks at past interpretations of the night are the prose highlights of the book, the only areas in which the writing achieves the invigorating style of the introduction.
Still, "A Day in the Night of America" could hardly fail to be fascinating stuff, because its real strength lies in the subject matter itself.
Matthew Chittum is a Roanoke writer, teacher and bartender.