THE APARTMENT

One apartment on Miami Beach becomes a microcosm of seven decades of ordinary, extraordinary lives.

Apartment 2B in an art deco building called the Helena on South Miami Beach serves as setting for all of the chapters of this moving, lyrical novel in short stories. New in 1942, it first houses a young military couple from Texas: Sophie and Jack Appleton. She’s giddy to find herself in such a glamorous town, but he’s preoccupied with the war, a war that will soon enough come home to them. In 1963, an aging Cuban concert pianist named Eugenio Francisco Montes Behar grieves for a lost love and finds the man’s spirit in music. In 1972, the tenant is Sandman, a refugee in his own country, a divorced Vietnam vet with PTSD who’s badly undone by an anti-war march, then saved by hatchling sea turtles. In 1982, Isabel is a lovely 18-year-old Marielita disappointed in South Beach at the nadir of its decay but dazzled by the older painter who installs her in the apartment first as muse, then as lover. In 2002, married couple Maribel Rodriguez and Ignacio Salas live there with his girlfriend, Beatrice Dumonts—a complicated threesome created not by love or desire but by immigration law. In 2010, Pilar, a Cuban American journalist, is packing to leave 2B (now a condo) after she loses her job and faces the bitter reality of moving back in with her parents at age 40. Pilar rents her condo to a young man named Lenin García, another Cuban refugee, who soon dies. The last and longest section, set in 2012, weaves Lenin’s heartbreaking story together with that of Lana, another immigrant who’s not who she seems to be. She tries to isolate herself but becomes engulfed in all of the extraordinary stories that haunt the Helena, including those of the living. Vividly drawn characters and finely crafted prose enhance these interwoven tales.

In Apartment 2B, the walls do talk, and their tales reveal their tenants’ minds and hearts.