|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epicurus.com - That Night
|
List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
Your Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
|
Average Customer Rating:   
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385333306
ISBN: 0385333307
Label: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1999-01-12
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Release Date: 1999-01-12
Studio: Dial Press Trade Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
On a warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly a car careens onto a family’s neat front yard, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains and leather, and a young man cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight fathers will pick up snow shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fueled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about and remember as the moment everything changed forever.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Forget the movie - read the book
Comment: I've just re-read this book after almost 20 years and found it as fresh and original and as moving as the first time. McDermott's style is sparse yet rich - if that sounds like a contradiction, think of a short poem that evokes an entire world in a few lines. This book does the same, in prose that sometimes can be read like a poem, in less than 200 pages. It is carefully constructed, moving back and forth in time and among the characters, something other reviewers found confusing; I suggest they stick to what's on the bestseller rack at their local supermarket to avoid over-exercising their brains. I also find the suggestion annoying that the book is somehow not as good as the movie because it avoids all that Hollywood balderdash about love being so strong that a guy will do anything to get back together with the girl taken from him "to spend the rest of his life with her". Instead of this sort of "and they lived happily ever after" trash the book shows us - lets us experience - the much more moving, bitter reality of life, both in the masterful descriptions of the suburban families on and around "That Night" and in what becomes of the two protagonists in the years that follow. Highly recommended to anyone interested in great literature; NOT recommended to anyone who has seen the movie and now wants to relive it by reading the book or who wants to read "a nice romantic novel" - that's not what this is, as one disappointed reviewer noted. To him/her my advice would be, if you want to get drunk quickly, try bourbon instead of champagne.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Her Best But Pretty Good
Comment: I really love Alice McDermott's writing and she didn't really disappoint me with 'That Night'. It seemed very real, very authentic. Some of it might have been a bit over the top and the ending was a little smooth but all in all I enjoyed it and recommend it. Read her others, like 'Charming Billy' and especially 'Child Of My Heart'. Better and best respectively.
Customer Rating:
Summary: There is better McDermott literature out there
Comment: The setting is 1960's Long Island. Two high school sweethearts, each with their own family secrets, become loves. Sheryl becomes pregnant, contact between the two is banned, so Rick comes on That Night to rescue his sweetheart from her parents' household prison. Our narrator is a young neighbor of Sheryl who observed the romance and aftermath from an innocent distance.
This is a melancholy novel filled with beautiful prose and description, but I agree with other readers that it doesn't necessarily go anywhere or hold your attention. This is more of a piece to be studied than a novel to enjoy. I wouldn't read it again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: nothing extraordinary
Comment: i had to read this book in school. it's horrible. it's annoying. There is no point to the story. It isn't even fun to read. I would keep reading, expecting something great to happen, but nothing ever happened. i skimmed the last 25 pages--it was that boring. there are quite a few typos in it as well. everything about it is pure cliche. the first few pages are good, then it stops. it's like, mcdermott had imagination when she began writing it, then she went braindead. i would not recommend it to anyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor -- read something else.
Comment: Men actually leave their yards and talk to one another. Children lie to each other about who does and who does not know how babies are made. Women spy on the house of another woman they don't much care for. And perhaps most shocking of all, Mrs. Carpenter sits in a chair that she purchased with no intention of sitting in. It sounds like suburbia to me. But in Alice McDermott's That Night, these actions are highly transgressive acts that violate the limits of the characters' previously circumscribed roles in the neighborhood. For men, that means not leaving your yard and barely saying hello to anyone. For women, the role is that of the stay-at-home gossip, fantasizing about widowhood and asking, about Sheryl's mother Ann: "What can you do for a woman like that?" What cataclysmic event incited these changes? A boyfriend wants to talk to his girlfriend. He and his friends confront her mother. Violence ensues, jarring the denizens of this neighborhood out of their own despair over the "difficult, enduring stuff of daily life," (36) and for a while, the community is transformed. Soon enough though, men go back to barely acknowledging each other, and "that night" becomes little more than a touchstone for the neighborhood gossip. This is suburbia according to McDermott: a tragedy happens in the lives of people you barely know, and at first glance it appears that the neighbors are rallying around the sufferers, when in fact, suburbanites need the pain of others to distract them from their own voids, and get a secondary benefit of always having something to talk about.
Our source of information about "that night," (a phrase invoked throughout the work to the point of heavy-handedness) the narrator, informs us "even children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller." (157) While this maxim seems self-evident when one is reading works such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, or the more recent, Middlesex, it certainly gave me pause when I read it in That Night. What are we to make of this statement, when McDermott does not let the narrator be known by us? Clues are sprinkled throughout as to what this person has been up to since "that night," but they don't add up to a character I can put my trust in, essential in a work where the narrator is the empathic vessel through which the reader witnesses all of the events of and surrounding "that night." She tells us about Sheryl's relationship with Rick; she tells us about Sheryl's experience in Ohio, and she is absent from both scenarios, as well as many others she also tells us about. This "ability" of the narrator to report on events that she did not attend led me to wonder whether or not as an adult she was imagining/inventing an entire sweeping context for a traumatic event she witnessed one evening during her childhood. Continuously, I asked myself: how would the narrator know this? I understand that sometimes the reader must accept the conventions that a novelist employs, but I felt here plausibility is under too much of a strain.
Eugenides avoids this trap in Middlesex by engaging us with a narrator we know a lot about - we know who Cal is, what he would or would not say, how he would act in a given situation - and by making him essential to the action of the story. McDermott doesn't even give her narrator a name. And yet, at the end of the book, much attention is paid to the demise of her marriage, and the selling of her parents' house. I found this to be a very curious choice on McDermott's part: why develop her character in the last chapter of the book when there was so little development before this point? Then I got to page 164, when the narrator talks to Rick, now a defeated man, who has come to look at her parents' house. She "asked him, `Do you know why she [Sheryl] moved away?' There was a coy hint of gossip in my voice...." The narrator is happy and quick to open old wounds for Rick. Whoever the little girl was that witnessed "that night," she has become one of the adults around her at the time, a person obsessed with one small event emblematic of the misery of other people. Sounds like a suburbanite to me.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
