That Night by Alice McDermott

First published: 1987

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1960’s to the 1980’s

Locale: Long Island, New York

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, unnamed, who is ten years old
• Sheryl, Rick’s teenage heartthrob
• Rick, a seventeen-year-old “hood”
• Mrs. Sayles, Sheryl’s mother

Form and Content

The phrase that titles Alice McDermott’s second novel, That Night, names also the novel’s central scene, around which in backward and forward sequence the whole story is told. Vivid in its presentation, the scene revolves in the memory of the unnamed narrator in much the same way that the cars belonging to Rick and his teenage buddies move slowly around and around the several blocks of the suburban neighborhood that provides the major setting of the novel. Slowly, the cars move in intricate patterns in and around the block, passing silently by the Sayleses’ house, sometimes pausing and then in slow motion taking up again the intricate patterns. The monotonous movement of the cars around and around becomes ominous, suggesting a funeral, the circlings of mourners around a coffin as they pay last respects. Indeed, in a way, this procession does mark a death—the end of a dream of love strong enough to conquer death. Rick’s cry rising above the engines of the idling cars and the window fans of the deserted houses is a kind of death wail, a poignant keen, for his lost love.

When Rick agrees with his leather-jacketed buddies that a proper form of behavior for those warring with a dominant society is to invade the enemy’s territory and carry off the enemy’s treasure, he must already know the inevitable conclusion, for men of warring tribes do not surrender their women to invaders. Neither do the T-shirted suburbanites. Rick’s demand to Mrs. Sayles that she send for Sheryl is already frustrated by Mrs. Sayles’ previous action. Sheryl is no longer there. She has been spirited off by the women, who play their roles as if they have been well rehearsed. Rick makes the mistake of reaching for Mrs. Sayles, however, and at that moment the men of the neighborhood, all more than a decade away from their soldiering in World War II, take up hoes, bats, sticks, and the tops of garbage cans to attack the boys, who have come equipped with chains. Many bruises later, Rick is in jail and the men have become comrades in arms, bonded at last in their suburban “paradise,” and ready to take up arms again and again, if necessary, to protect the virtue of their daughters and their wives.

Like the circumnavigation of the cars, the narrative follows a circular movement in time. After “that night,” the narrator recounts the previous several hours, then returns to the fight, pausing there before taking the reader forward several days and then back even farther to the previous summer, only to bring the reader forward again to the several ensuing days after the fight. All the while, the narrator’s comments wind circuitously around previous and forthcoming decades until it is clear that the circumstances of “that night” simply adumbrate what is to come for all the daughters and all the sons: the knowledge that love alone, even first love, which is relatively uncomplicated and fierce, is not enough; that love eventually comes to nothing; that children become adults and lose their children in one of myriad ways; that there is no way to halt the passing of time and beauty, even though one may try as hard as one might and in seemingly ridiculous ways.

Witness Mrs. Carpenter, whose taste for beauty and longing for permanence overwhelm her good sense to the point that she relegates family living to the basement because she believes that living in the house will disturb the pristine beauty of the furnishings. Twenty years later, the neighborhood will be all but abandoned by the people who settled there, looking for the completion of the American Dream promised after World War II, a dream that seemed to guarantee to every American “war hero” a family, a home, and an automobile to transport him to and from his daily work.

Sheryl, delivered into the hands of other women in the family, takes the course expected of all Catholic girls: a waiting period followed by secretion; a birth, followed by an adoption; and a return to a point left off or one reasonably similar to it. Sheryl stays with a cousin who cares for her conscientiously and delivers her promptly back to her immediate relatives, who have moved to another suburb in another state. Sheryl knows what is expected of her. She takes up again where she left off, looking for a boyfriend to help assuage her grief for her father’s passing and for Rick, her lost loves. She will eventually marry and have children, as will Rick and the narrator, who, at the end of the novel, has lost a child, left a husband, and is in the act of selling the suburban home in which she grew up.

Context

A relative newcomer to the novelists’ calling, Alice McDermott grew up during the decades when women’s issues came to the forefront of the concerns of people in the English-speaking world. Standard feminist texts were being published as McDermott made her way through school; she could not have helped but be influenced by so dominant a movement. That Night is not a feminist text through proclamation; it is a feminist text in its rendering of the social order both within and without families in Suburbia, U.S.A., during a short period in American history when shared values were stable, when a sense of community was strong, and when men and women knew their “place” in family life.

Men were the breadwinners; women were the caretakers of the home. Men did “manly” things—going to and from work in elaborate machines, using less elaborate machines to cut grass and keep the yards tidy, and using shoulder muscles to lift heavy objects such as garbage cans brought to curbs. These men had just returned from soldiering in another world war—the last, they thought—to save home and family and shared American values. They did not anticipate another war that would call their sons to “duty” and possible death.

Consequently, the men in That Night rally to save home and hearth from a group of teenagers—black-jacketed “hoods” in hot rods who represent a threat to a way of life that the dominant culture holds sacred. The male bonding that results confirms their identities as they withstand the threat while women and children stand on the sidelines watching the battle.

After World War II, women gave up the jobs they had taken to replace men who had been called to the service of their country. They took up housewifely duties in little box houses where they cooked and cleaned and bore children—the emblem of their fulfillment as women, as well as insurance against a future when children might be called upon to care for mothers and grandmothers who had been widowed or otherwise left alone.

Consequently, the women in That Night take care to protect their daughters from scandal, moving in concert as though they have already rehearsed their actions. Therefore, Mrs. Sayles is bitter and angry when her husband dies prematurely, thus breaking his marital vows; the narrator’s mother is furious when she learns that Leela’s husband left her to marry a woman who could bear children more easily; and the narrator’s mother tries frantically to have another baby even though she already has two. How does one measure a woman’s worth? The men and women in this novel would say, “In the light of her ability to mother her husband’s child, to care for her husband’s house, and to put a meal on her husband’s table.” It is no wonder that the narrator’s father wonders what his wife has to talk about with their friends.

All the shared values, however, and all the unquestioned acceptance of roles in the family and social structures assure no one of happiness or freedom from pain. The events in the novel make this fact clear. It also does not seem to matter what the prevailing social mores are. By the end of the novel, the narrator, a grown woman, laments the breakup of her marriage and the postponement of children, for at the end of the novel twenty years have passed and in real time the flower children have come and gone, the Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement have brought about many changes, the family, as Americans once knew it, is on its way out, and shared values are only an illusion of a past time.

Bibliography

Balliett, Whitney “Books: Families.” The New Yorker 63 (August 17, 1987): 71. A discussion of the richness of That Night as compared with minimalist fiction that also deals with middle-class values but in spare and bleak ways. Balliett also mentions McDermott’s prose style and her use of amplifying and overlapping clauses in sentences. He agrees that the book is about life in the suburbs but insists that That Night is more than that. It is about the adolescent passion of a first love that can never be repeated.

Leavitt, David. “Fathers, Daughters, and Hoodlums.” The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, 1, 29-30. Leavitt also points to the differences between McDermott’s work and that of minimalists whose settings and characters are similar but whose tones, moods, and themes are different. Whereas minimalist work is ironic and bleak, McDermott’s is accepting and elegiac. The difference is primarily in the baroque richness of the language, and the complexity of the moral vision McDermott presents, Leavitt says, invests her novel with historical authenticity.

Towers, Robert. “All American Novels.” New York Review of Books 34 (January 21, 1988): 26-27. Towers calls That Night a pleasant piece of bittersweet Americana, faithful to historical time and place. He suggests that too much praise has gone to the novel. Nothing in the book is in any way remarkable, Towers concludes—not characters, not descriptions, not use of language. The novel is, however, Towers says, a small, decent work that is successful within the limits the author sets.