Safelight: A Novel [Paperback]

Shannon Burke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2005

It’s 1990, and New York City is in shambles: unemployment reigns, crack wars rage, and whole neighborhoods burn as delinquent landlords cash in. Struggling to come to terms with his father’s death, paramedic and photographer Frank Verbeckas descends into the chaos and misery of upper Manhattan, taking photographs of the ill, the wounded, the dying, and the down-and-out. Accompanying him on his wanderings are his loudmouthed partner, Burnett; his best friend, Hock, who boosts drugs from the hospital; and his brother, Norman, a surgeon who can’t understand why Frank is in such pain. Frank’s ruin seems inevitable, but when he meets Emily, a professional fencer whose days are numbered by a fatal illness, his world changes. Against everyone’s advice, Frank and Emily fall in love. Together, they try to find a way out of the murk of guilt and sadness and learn to draw meaning and beauty from despair.

In short, cinematic scenes, with not a word wasted and nothing told that can be shown, Shannon Burke leads us on a powerful journey through the darkest precincts of the street and of the soul. Honest, terse, and enormously moving, Safelight is a debut of remarkable depth, a stunning, clear-eyed, and sympathetic portrait of American life and death–a love story not for the faint of heart.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this dark, tender debut, Frank Verbeckas is a young paramedic patrolling the mean streets of Manhattan. Frank's real passion, however, is photography; he's constantly snapping pictures of injured and dead bodies while on his rounds. "I don't like healthy people," he tells his brutish partner, Burnett. Though Frank treats his photographs as just a harmless hobby, the obsession runs much deeper. What he's really after is photography's ability to give him "a clarity and precision" that he lacks in real life, where the violence of his job punctuates an ever-present loneliness. His father is dead; his mother's in another state; his surgeon brother treats him with contempt. Frank's only refuge is the homemade darkroom in his apartment, where he spends hours under the "weightless, red glow" of a safelight. His emotional numbness gets him into trouble when he joins up with Burnett and another medic to sell stolen drugs from the hospital. But his relationship with 21-year-old Emily Pascal, a fencer infected with HIV, finally shakes him out of his detachment. The doomed romance is rather sentimental (like a minimalist, edgy Love Story), but Burke's spare prose and sharp eye for the beauty in urban misery makes this a moving tale of lost souls searching for permanence in a chaotic world.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In the free-fire zone of early-1990s Harlem, emergency medical technician Frank Verbeckas drifts from one fresh horror to the next. Numbed by his father's suicide, Frank falls in with a rough-and-tumble ambulance crew that is as willing to deliver bruising blows to a rummy frequent flier as it is to provide top-flight care to hopeless trauma cases. When he isn't boosting narcotics or encouraging insurance scams against the city, Frank snaps photos of the dead, the dying, and the down-and-out. His cowboy-surgeon brother, Norman, berates Frank for wasting his life. And he does seem headed for disaster--until he meets Emily Pascal, an HIV-positive competitive fencer. Against his better judgment, Frank eases into a romance. In punchy, cinematic chapters, Burke tenderly illustrates the transformative powers of love between people riding out tough emotional times even as he keeps the medical lowlight reel rolling. As Frank opens up, he imagines how the photos might improve his life instead of just allowing him to morbidly relive the past. Sometimes, redemption can be claimed in the heartbeat of a tripping shutter. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812971744
• ISBN-13: 978-0812971743
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #613,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Give This A Try, You Just Might Like It, January 22, 2005

By 

Book 'Em Danno - See all my reviews

This review is from: Safelight: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Safelight" is a novel that pulls you in at the start. There is no building of characters, no climax. You either step right in and enjoy the ride or get off.

The main character is such a hard nut to crack. There are some authors who want you to empathize wth the characters and you are drawn into the story. Mr. Burke does the opposite, he intentionally keeps the main character distant. You never really get inside of what he's like, only a glimpse that he does have feelings when he carries on a relationship with an HIV positive female.

The book wasn't very long and reads like snapshots. You'll get your focus but then it's gone. You'll either finish this book and stick with it because reading this chaos is manageable or you'll put it down out of frustration that it's all over the place. There's no middle ground with it. I invite you to give it a try and if you finish it I can guarantee you won't forget it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Haunting Story, January 29, 2005

By 

Lee Irby (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Safelight: A Novel (Hardcover)

There is no doubt that Shannon Burke has emerged as an important writer. This work is very hard to forget. You'd like to tell yourself that since it's a novel, he's just making up stuff--but as the New York Times pointed out, Burke spent about five years in Harlem as an EMT. In a way, this is a war novel, akin to early Hemingway. Burke is trying to make sense of what he saw and experienced, a lot of it gut-wrenching.

If you like spiffy, bleach-cleaned, MFA-program novels, this ain't for you. Burke's work harkens back to an earlier time in American literature, when books were earned and not gift-wrapped by faculty advisers. The writing here is spare, poetic, and perfectly pitched. The characters leap off the page. Money well spent in my opinion.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars quietly moving, December 29, 2004

By 

Monica J. Kern (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Safelight: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a book that grows on you. The prose is sparse, and the book essentially consists of short vignettes that initially have no apparent meaning or relation to the other scenes. I was at first somewhat frustrated with the novel because I could not immediately figure out where the plot was leading to, or even what the plot was. However, the scenes gradually build to a crescendo, and the result is a book that is simultaneously sad and inspirational, one that creates a mood that lingers long after you have finished it.

Burke's writing style is distinctive and highly impressive for a first novel. It probably didn't help that I read this book shortly after finishing Tom Wolfe's latest novel, as the two styles could not be more different. Wolfe can devote paragraphs to describing the clothing of a minor character, and it takes at least days of devoted reading to get through his tomes. I zipped through Safelight, however, in just a couple of hours. But I do not mean to imply that book is lightweight; its message of regret, grief, and daring to love despite inevitable heartbreak makes this a disturbing yet highly moving novel. I look forward to reading more of Burke's work in the future.