SOURCE: "Fathers, Daughters and Hoodlums," in The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, pp. 1, 29-30.

Leavitt is an American novelist and short story writer. In the review below, he asserts that the "baroque richness of Ms. McDermott's sentences, the intellectual complexity of her moral vision, and the explicit emotion of her voice" distinguish That Night from other novels treating similar themes and incorporating suburban settings.

Suburbia has never had a very good rep in American literature. That man-made purgatory of our modern culture, situated at some precarious point halfway between the city with its violent grittiness and the small town with its long-kept secrets and fresh-bread smells, the suburb, for all its popular idealization, is usually frowned upon in the halls of high culture. Some notion of the decay of civilization—what Barbara Tuchman called "the decline of quality"—is attached to suburban life, for it's out there...