Contemporary Authors

Jennifer Kitses grew up in Philadelphia. She received an MLitt in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and has worked for Bloomberg News, Condé Nast Portfolio, and Columbia Business School. Her fiction has appeared in Akashic Books’ online series, Mondays Are Murder. She lives with her family in New York.

Small Hours is her first novel.

Jennifer Kitses is the author of the novel Small Hours. She received an MLitt in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and has worked for Bloomberg News, Condé Nast Portfolio, and Columbia Business School. Her fiction has appeared in Akashic Books' online series, Mondays Are Murder. She lives with her family in New York.

Jennifer Kitses is the author of the novel Small Hours. She received an MLitt in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and has worked for Bloomberg News, Condé Nast Portfolio, and Columbia Business School. Her fiction has appeared in Akashic Books' online series, Mondays Are Murder. She lives with her family in New York.

Over 24 increasingly suspenseful hours, a family’s suburban life unravels.

A tense domestic drama, Kitses’ first novel alternates between the points of view of a husband and wife torn apart by what they don’t tell each other. Tom and Helen have moved from Queens to a small town 90 minutes up the Hudson River with their twin 3-year-old daughters, but their life isn’t as bucolic as they had hoped it would be. Though they’re both working hard—Tom at a news wire service and Helen as a freelance graphic designer—they’re having trouble making ends meet, and the town for which they had high hopes turns out to have a seamy underside. As the day goes on, full of frictions major and minor, both husband and wife come close to reaching the breaking point. Tom finds himself in a confrontation with an old lover with whom he has a complicated relationship, while Helen, already simmering with anger, finds herself taking out her feelings on a pair of teenagers she meets in a park, with unfortunate results. Leavened with occasional humor, particularly directed toward the wire service, the novel gradually and inexorably ratchets up its suspense, with each tiny choice that one of the characters makes spiraling out into a path of destructive behavior. Even as the consequences of these choices grow more severe, Kitses keeps them believable so that the reader’s increasing dread can’t be easily dismissed. The author anchors the family’s story in a larger contemporary social reality, in which the actions of the couple are shaped not just by their emotions, but by the “blighted, postindustrial” town where the value of their house is constantly declining, the fact that both Helen and Tom have been edged out of steady jobs into marginal work, and the lack of affordable child care.

The novel succeeds as both a disquieting tale of ordinary horror and a portrait of a marriage at a tipping point.

Kitses’s debut chronicles a critical day in the strained lives of Helen Nichols and Tom Foster, the parents of three-year-old twins in the New York suburb of Devon. While living in Queens with Helen and working at a science magazine, Tom began a brief affair with his colleague Donna. Though reluctant to be a parent, Tom had twin girls, Ilona and Sophie, with Helen, as well as another daughter, Elana, with Donna. Helen learns about his indiscretion, though he doesn’t confess the identity of his affair partner or that he had a child with her. After a move to the isolating suburbs, Tom is commuting daily to a job that he dislikes while Helen does tedious design work from home. The stress of dealing with toddlers, coupled with her thankless work, leads her to unleash her frustration on a pair of rough teenagers. After her neighbor’s kid Nick comes to the rescue, Helen spends the day wondering if someone might be gunning for them. Meanwhile, Tom learns from Donna that a job offer in London might take Elana away from him. Donna wants Tom to come clean with Helen about everything; he’s still hesitant despite Donna’s threat to bring lawyers into the matter. Finally, a series of events force him and Helen to deal with one another. All these conflicts are realistic and compelling: the loss of income coupled with a lifestyle Tom and Helen can’t really afford puts a strain on their already tested marriage, with the couple’s negative propensities exacerbating the problem. The book’s ending hits a note that’s a touch too optimistic, but is still in keeping with the theme that there’s no easy way out for these characters.

The single day that unfolds in Jennifer Kitses’ debut novel, Small Hours, is packed with harrowing, edge-of-your-seat drama, high-stakes decisions, and constant physical and psychological danger.

Her book offers, as well, a fascinating, and uncomfortable view of a world we may not want to recognize as our own. The story of a marriage troubled by secrets is one that many authors have explored, but Kitses makes it her own by creating characters who mirror some of society’s most disturbing tendencies — a toxic obsession with time and productivity, an assumption of violence everywhere under the surface waiting to explode, a dream of middle-class success and happiness that is, by design, unattainable.

These are the realities of life for the book’s protagonists, Helen and Tom, although certainly they’ve made some bad choices, too. A young professional couple with twin 3-year-old girls, they have relocated from Manhattan to a former mill town, but the recession has wrecked property values and turned Helen into an underpaid freelancer, with the added hardship that their new home is a two-hour commute to Tom’s job in the city.

Compounding these stresses are some powerful secrets Tom has kept from his wife but which now threaten to destroy their life together. Helen has become a person of secrets, too, withholding her thoughts and fears from Tom, contributing in her own way to the erosion of intimacy between them.

Kitses portrays their world with impressive skill. Her insider’s view of the high-pressure newsroom where Tom churns out corrected copy all day long is rich and precise. This place is a swirling circus of clashing personalities and rapid-rolling deadlines, which Tom struggles to keep up with, distracted as he is by the crisis in his marriage:

“He checked the queue and opened the next story, a brief filed by a young reporter — the nephew of the global sales manager — whose tendency to cut and paste from Wikipedia had earned him the nickname Control V.”

Tom survives that one, but then immediately “his screen blazed red with an urgent message from the Hong Kong bureau chief, who apparently never left the office. WTF? Where’s our panda feature?”

The people in that newsroom, and everywhere in the book, have a distorted relationship with time. They parse it into fractions and set impossible goals for those fractions. They are obsessed with time, watching it, bargaining with it, but often don’t get much done. They delude themselves into thinking they can manage time, not unlike the way Helen and Tom convince themselves they can manage their destructive secrets and lies.

Helen, way behind on a project deadline, gets a babysitter to watch her daughters so she can work, but as soon as the sitter arrives, she goes for a run instead. On her return, she calls Tom, spends some time looking out the window, then learns that the sitter needs to leave shortly.

Helen’s marital problems are causing some of this procrastination, but she’s also guilty of a kind of hubris about time management that likewise afflicts Tom. His hubris is clear from the book’s opening scene, in which he decides, at 6:20 a.m., that he can fit in a big outdoor excursion with the twins before he catches his 7:13 train. The world Kitses paints is one that has run out of time. But its inhabitants can’t let time go.

Kitses is also interested in our relationships with violence. In this world, it feels normal to be angry — Helen is a key example, kickboxing at the gym or aiming her high-powered water gun out the window at her neighbors — and everyone is dangerous, including idle teenagers and even toddlers.

Her twins imitate the grown-up violence they see, turning an ugly scene they’ve witnessed into a bath-time game that involves one of them repeatedly smashing a shampoo bottle out of the other’s hand.

It’s to Helen’s credit that their behavior disturbs her and she recognizes what inspired it. But it is not to her credit that her reaction is to lash out. She hisses at them, which makes them cry and shrink from her. She watches them “scared and shivering in the cooling water” and feels heartbroken. Her complex reaction — rage and love and sorrow — humanizes her, even though, like other characters in the book, she is not easy to like.

The complicated experience of parents trying to provide, financially and emotionally, for their kids is something Jennifer Kitses does well in Small Hours. She nails life with toddlers as pitch-perfectly as she captures the life of Tom’s newsroom. The twins are dismantling dollhouses, sleeping through sirens, melting down without warning, demanding the same book again and again, escaping from the house when no one’s looking. It’s an unsentimental but sympathetic look at parenting. It is hard not to feel for this flawed, selfish, overwhelmed couple.

This attention to the domestic sphere is something that distinguishes Small Hours from other books about big-city career-climbing and suburban keeping-up-with-the-Joneses. It’s a book that says the struggles of young, middle-class parents matter.

Small Hours is not small. It’s a highwire act, a suspenseful psychological thriller that holds up a mirror to society. The characters’ disenchantment is familiar as they ponder the old beliefs they are trying to let go: “That hard work would be rewarded. That those who followed the rules wouldn’t slip behind. That there was some value — a trade-off, even — in focusing on goals, not dreams.”

At the end of Small Hours, we can only hope there is a way back to a place where there are some dreams left.

Twenty-four hours add up to one tough day for Tom and Helen Foster in “Small Hours.” Between them they have two stressful jobs, twin 3-year-olds, one long commute and no end of financial pressure. If those were their only problems, they might be fine.

In her debut novel, Jennifer Kitses spins an intriguing tale about this couple in particular, but also about the choices people make, and what happens when plans go bad.

Tom and Helen had good jobs in New York City. They bought a house in an old mill town 90 minutes upriver and seemed well on their way. Then the economic crash downsized their good jobs. The bills — for the house, the high-end day care, the new life — did not downsize.

As pressures mount, the couple who used to tell each other everything start holding back. The weight of their secrets is poised to tip them over.

Neither Tom nor Helen is a particularly sympathetic character. Helen has pushed the family to the financial brink in pursuit of her dreams. Tom has kept up a complicated connection with a former lover. When they’re sleep-deprived, as they always are, their judgment gets even worse. Still, the reader pulls for them.

Kitses skillfully builds the tension as our protagonists slide from one crisis to the next. As in a thriller, the reader wants to yell, “No! Don’t do that!” as the hero and heroine proceed to do just that.

The story unfolds in split screen over one day, alternating between Tom and Helen and time-stamping each chapter, starting at 6:20 a.m., when the 3-year-olds rouse Tom from the couch. As the day wears on, Helen finds herself in a confrontation with doped-up teenagers on a playground. Will she de-escalate the situation as a role model should? Tom stays late to atone for major mistakes at work and then, when he’s supposed to catch the train home, he gets invited out for a drink by an attractive co-worker. Will he do the sensible thing? By the 11:20 p.m. chapter, we know the odds are slim.

The late-night action, with Tom lurching from an apartment couch to a bar to his ex-lover’s house, has a kitchen-sink feel to it, as if Kitses, who worked for Bloomberg News, is emptying her reporter’s notebook. But that’s a quibble in a well-constructed narrative. In the final chapter, as Tom and Helen reconnect, Kitses brings the story home with a haunting question: When times get tough, do you stay or do you go?

Even as our protagonists move on with their lives, they leave the reader pondering that question.

While adding books onto my to-be-read shelf I stumbled upon ‘Small Hours’ by Jennifer Kitses. I was immediately intrigued by it and the theme it deals with – marriage. I find it funny how a nineteen year old me is interested in the theme of marriage but has no plans on getting married himself ever (that might change?) but there is something about these books that make me get excited and want to read them – maybe it’s the mystery of marriage (what secrets can one hold) or how a person can be with another person for so long. There’s so much to explore in the theme of marriage and this book deals with a certain aspect of it.

As the blurb says ‘..a husband and wife try to outrun long-buried secrets, sending their lives spiraling into chaos.’ and if that doesn’t sound interesting and appealing to you then I don’t know what does. This novel follows two spouses – the wife Helen and her husband Tom – who have two daughters and live in a town outside of New York. Helen is a graphic designer whose life seems to evolve around her work and her children and Tom is an editor at a science magazine who also has problems of his own – but there is one thing that is eating him alive and causing him problems with sleeping and concentrating on work and his family. Their marriage seems to be a normal hectic one as marriages are – with their children and work keeping them busy – but what we learn is that there’s much more to it as it always is with any marriage. So that’s about it because I don’t want to spoil the book for you.

The books happenings are told in the span of 24 hours and deal with issues that come up with marriage. I enjoyed this book very much – while it wasn’t a perfect book filled with a lot of happenings it’s a book that slowly reveals the nature of the relationship between the spouses and their intrapersonal relationships. I have to say that people comparing it to ‘Gone Girl’ because of the marriage theme and secrets is frustrating and nowadays everything is compared to ‘Gone Girl’ but nevertheless this is a book which is still interesting. The characters were finely crafted but I found myself more interested in the story of the husband rather than the wife’s which is sort of the point of the book because he’s the one with secrets. What I’ll say is that this book won’t be for everyone because if you’re looking for a rollercoaster ride you’re not getting it (it’s more of a psychological book and definitely not a thriller). The reason why I say this is if you’re not interested in this subject matter you won’t like it. I’ve seen mixed reviews of this one and it just depends on your interests but I’ve enjoyed it and would recommend it. The most action comes at the end of the novel so i wouldn’t call the blurb as accurate because it might mislead the reader and build up different expectations. Just a heads up: you won’t get a satisfying ending if you’re looking for one because it leaves you wanting more.

That said this is a good exploration into the psyches of the spouses and buried secrets resurfacing and finding their way into a marriage.

Unfolding in alternating perspectives, Small Hours, showcases a marriage on the brink of disaster. Tom and Helen wake up under the assumption that their lives are under control, that their marriage is strong. But, as the day progresses, those fallacies slowly begins to crumble. Why? Secrets.

Small Hours is a story of secrets. Secrets a husband has long hidden from his wife. Secrets she is ashamed to share with him. It’s the story of secrets that can no longer be silenced. Secrets that have the power to destroy a good marriage, a marriage neither husband or wife realized was on the precipice of disaster.

“She’d never said anything to Tom about that moment of anger. Or about any of the ones that followed. They became part of an ever-widening category of what she kept to herself.”

“There was only one thing he understood with certainty: This life, as he knew it, was coming to an end. These stolen hours that he’d spent checked out from the never-ending pressures of his all-too-real life.”

This couple has lived for a long time pretending their world was right, but as the day unfolds their secrets rear up and can no longer be ignored. Jennifer Kitses has done a wonderful job presenting an ordinary couple battling their way through complicated circumstances that they’re largely responsible for creating. For both Tom and Helen she’s developed backstories that lead to a realistic domino effect for their individual crises. I very much liked that Kitses had elements of Tom’s story leading to element’s of Helen’s and vice versa. The questions quickly became, “What kind of secrets can this marriage survive?” and “Who will be responsible for toppling their union?”

At times the choices Tom and Helen made seemed a little “out there,” but not enough so that they were difficult to overlook. And, I found the ending very satisfying. Small Hours is a fun, fast paced book that would be perfect to tuck in your bag for a vacation read this summer. Grade: B

Over the course of one day, Kitses’s novel built around a fracturing relationship explores our propensity for self-delusion and the way misbeliefs can damage our lives behind repair. Lies and secrets circle around Tom and Helen, who have recently left the hustle of Manhattan for the Hudson Valley’s suburban Devon. Together with their young daughters, Sophie and Ilona, Tom and Helen hope to lead a more tranquil life. Tom seems perpetually plagued by anxiety while Helen attempts to recover from her late nights and deadlines working as a graphic designer. Their morning begins when Tom decides to give his wife a break by taking his daughters out for an adventure.

Tom and Helen love each other, but at this point neither has any idea how to turn things around in an environment where “an unexpected bill or a missing paycheck could send them into a tailspin.” Tom wasn’t all that excited about moving to Devon, but he recognized that Helen was nostalgic for tree-lined streets and quiet roads. Though Helen encouraged Tom to see the suburb’s beauty, nothing in Tom’s childhood prepared him for a place so “achingly quiet.” Neither Tom or Helen could envision what happened in the months after the 2008 financial crisis, when Tom found himself out of a job and desperate to find another: “we had hopes and bad timing. That’s all.”

As Tom and Helen begin their revelatory journey through a minefield of futile dreams, Tom is distracted by the simplest of things, constantly zoning out and slipping away into a landscape where his problems and failures can’t reach him: “For a few moments he was outside of time, outside of himself.” We aren’t quite sure why Tom is so unfocussed, apart from the act that he’s having hard time dealing with his job as an editor for a Manhattan newspaper. One impulsive encounter with his boss, Donna, adds to Tom’s sense of dread; he’s penitently weighed down by the many ways he could hurt Helen.

Helen is plagued by anger. As her boss breathes down her neck, pressuring her to finish a new marketing and promotion campaign for his media conglomerate, she recalls a time at Grand Central Station when she was immobilized by a sudden fury. She’s never said anything to Tom, the simmering incident part of an ever-widening category she that she has kept to herself. Her only solace are her visits to her neighbor, Karl. Over the past couple of years, Karl’s studio has become a second home to her, a refuge from the pressures and frustrations of her own desk.

Though a fledgling author, Kitses writes with all of the confidence of the great American literary masters. In provocative and unsettling prose, she delves deep into Tom and Helen’s views of themselves and of each other. In the process, she gives us a real odyssey into human frailty, guilt, and self-delusion. Beyond Devon’s soft, damp air, where the morning light often turns a deep bottle green, Kitses carefully dissects her case for modern marriage and relationships. No matter how distant one gets from the madding crowd in place or time, finding true fulfillment can be just as bedeviling. The story covers everything from the "truths" we tell ourselves about our lives to our childhood traumas and our inability to find satisfaction in everyday life.

Eventually Helen’s anger boils over after an unexpected confrontation with two local teenage girls. Although she never knows the extent of Tom’s secret, she deflects the knowledge about her husband in whatever way she can. Tom assures his wife that he will soon show or at least call, though he tries to hide from a wave of dread and his series of accumulated mistakes and failures. He recalls his reaction to the results of Helen’s sonogram and an overheard conversation between Donna and her copyeditor. As night falls and Tom stays in Manhattan caught up in self-contained drama, his relationship with Donna shades into something far more complex. Is there any hope of saving his marriage? After discovering the true nature of Tom’s betrayal, Helen’s dissatisfaction transforms into a yearning for a time when hard work was rewarded and there was at least some value and some tradeoff in focusing on one’s goals and dreams.

Similar in tone and theme to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, albeit from a 21st-century vantage-point, Kitses offers up much more in her view of how deception can fracture a marriage. Yes, the book and its inevitable, tragic revelation show the bleak underbelly of the American Dream, but it also goes much further - exposing the austere landscape of regret for opportunities missed and the necessary accommodations and compromises that most of us are forced to make in life.

Small Hours by Jennifer Kitses is an intense read that is sure to leave a mark on the readers.

Given the short and undescriptive blurb of this book, I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect from it. Though sceptical, I decided to give it a try as it kind of intrigued me. Anyway, reading a book without knowing anything about the story is quite exciting, at least for me, so I went ahead and read it. By the quarter mark, I was glad that I did so as this book turned out to be an excellent example of what exactly a contemporary fiction book should be like.

I liked the plot and the basic premise of the story. It was a very intense read about the complexities of relationships and how people change with time and their thought-process and reactions get impacted accordingly. The characterization was brilliant and though I didn’t connect tot he characters personally, I was very engaged int heir day-to-day life.

The beginning of the story was very engaging and the ending was utterly perfect, it was so good in fact that I read the last part thrice to soak it all in – the way issues were confronted and handled. I loved the inner conflicts in this book and really marvelled the author’s writing style.

If you want to read one contemporary fiction this year, make sure this is it.

Reading this book reminded me of that classic quote from the movie Cool Hand Luke: "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

So many of the issues faced by the characters might only have been avoided if they had spoken up, rather than kept things to themselves, or figured they'd talk about it some other time.

Both Tom and Helen feel their lives are spiraling out of control, but neither has expressed that feeling to the other. At a particularly vulnerable time, they left New York City and moved more than an hour away to a suburb that promised to be the next great destination, but those plans never materialized, and they find themselves in a fairly deserted town in a house that is more than they realistically can afford.

Helen, a freelance graphic designer, is feeling overwhelmed with the challenges of a growing workload and the demands of staying home to care for the couple's twin daughters, Sophie and Ilona. Although they have made friends with the couple across the street, she still feels as if many in the neighborhood judge her, and Tom, and it's starting to make her feel increasingly angry. For reasons she cannot explain, she is edging closer and closer to the desire to inflict physical violence on someone, but she's afraid to utter this aloud or figure out why she feels this way.

Tom, meanwhile, has his own secrets—one in particular which threatens to topple everything he has. The sheer act of maintaining the façade that everything is fine is taking its toll on him—he is barely sleeping and he is having trouble concentrating, which is particularly troublesome given that he works as an editor on a newswire service. He doesn't realize that Helen notices his inability to focus, but he isn't ready to discuss anything with her.

Over the course of one day, both will be pushed to their limits. Neither is prepared for what they will face, on what seems like another ordinary day, but it will test everything—their ability to parent, their jobs, their relationships with their peers, and most importantly, their marriage. And while they've seen some of what's on the horizon, most will catch them totally unprepared.

This was an interesting book, a look at a suburban marriage which seems to be imploding, both because of misunderstandings and actual misdeeds, but neither person wants to verbalize what is bothering them. Jennifer Kitses keeps dialing up the suspense, making you wonder just how far she'll push her characters, and what she'll make them face in the end. I kept approaching the story like I would a horror movie, because I wasn't sure just how out-of-hand she'd let things get. (While the book really hinted at the possibility of utter chaos, I was glad things didn't explode that badly.)

Neither character is particularly appealing the day the book takes place, but you can see what they were like when they were at their best. I'll admit, I get frustrated when the events of a book turn more on things that are unsaid, when characters tend to be stoic rather than share what's going on, and while that certainly happened in this book, it didn't seem overly egregious.

I didn't love this as much as I hoped I would, but it was very well-written, and it certainly was suspenseful to an extent. I believe this is Kitses' first novel, so she definitely has a great career ahead of her given how well this was told. I could definitely see this as an interesting movie.

After moving to what Helen believes to be the ideal neighborhood, Tom and Helen raise their daughters and slowly realize that the everyday struggles of work and raising children have created a slight rift between the two of them. The neighborhood is not what it seems to be and Tom’s relationship with another woman, one that results in another daughter almost the same age as the two he has, forces him to keep the secret long after he intends to.

What an interesting story. It’s told hour-by-hour and all in one day so what we see as a reader is the breaking point, really. The point where Helen and Tom have to come to grips with their reality and it’s not pretty but it’s very honest and very real. As readers we get to share in their regret and their fears. I really enjoyed the writing and the deep looks into each of the main characters. There are no “bad guys” here. Each character is trying his or her best to be the best person they can be. It’s a struggle but not impossible.

Lovely. Small Hours is lovely read with deeply flawed characters and a story that’s told in a quiet but direct way. I recommend it.