I get most of my reading done on the New York subways, and that's where I read this beautifully written, psychologically acute book about the residents of a building in lower Manhattan during the final decade of the World Trade Center. Having experienced the events of September 11, 2001 from close range, I can't claim full objectivity regarding any fictionalized depiction of the events. I can say that when the attacks occurred near the end of the book, I was thoroughly re-shaken, and it wasn't just the rattling of the subway cars.

Though the two rivers of the title are, of course, the East and the Hudson, which bound Manhattan Island on either side, they might also be interpreted as the twin flows of Time and Life, which Rinaldi's characters explicitly puzzle over throughout the book. "Those three slow months in Ecuador," one of the characters recollects, "it was a fever, a level of desire she'd never felt before. Time was so wonderful, she thought. It spreads out, weaving and wandering. It turns and folds over on itself, full of surprises." But in the same chapter, reflecting on the passing of the generations: "Time is too painful, it twists and turns, it teases and torments. It tips you upside down and leaves you dangling." And finally: "Time...turns back on itself, and you are never where you thought you were. She begins to think of time as something she could hate..."

Not so much a novel, the book is more a series of interconnected stories that add up to a long meditation on turn-of-the-millennium New York City and the world. Written in a present tense appropriate to the dreaminess of its stories, it concerns a handful of residents of Echo Terrace, a fictional Battery Park City condominium building close to the Trade Center. Though the multi-ethnic cast includes characters as different as an internationally known quilter, a German WWII flying ace, a Middle Eastern spice trader, a Japanese businessman, and a plastic surgeon specializing in sex changes, nearly all are wealthy. Focusing on the rich enables Rinaldi to create for his characters adventures that working class people couldn't have.

Dr. Tattafruge's midlife crisis takes the form of abandoning his practice to row up the Hudson to the Erie Canal and aim for the West Coast in a ceremonial canoe he purchased in his youth from natives in Papua New Guinea. Nora, the widow of a famous rainforest biologist, keeps a menagerie of exotic animals in her apartment until something drastic and mysterious happens to both them and her. Karl Vogel has a fleeting romance with a young writer whose interest in Vogel's war stories turns out to be more than historical. Without the comforts of money, these people wouldn't have the luxury of living in dreams and memories as they so often do. Using the language of magic realism, Rinaldi spins his protagonists' gold into imaginative tapestries, transforming the everyday - and the merely unusual - into the uncanny.