SOURCE: "All-American Novels," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIV, Nos. 21-2, January 21, 1988, pp. 26-7.

Towers is an American novelist. In the excerpt below, he commends the accuracy with which McDermott recreates a lower-middle-class Long Island town during the early 1960s as well as her focus on the ordinary in That Night, but he questions the book's merit as a contender for the National Book Award for Fiction.

That Night, a second novel by Alice McDermott, was a runner-up for the [National Book Award for Fiction]. Its subject is the love affair between two teen-agers, Rick and Sheryl, and its setting is a lower-middle-class, mostly Catholic, Long Island suburb in the early 1960s; more broadly, it is the story of the neighborhood's response to the violent termination of the affair as witnessed by a ten-year-old girl who has been following its progress with all of the...