Critical Essay | Karen Ahlefelder Watkins

SOURCE: "A Streetcar Named Syosset," in The New Republic, Vol. 196, No. 21, May 25, 1987, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Watkins maintains that although McDermott's narrator often distracts readers from the characters whose story she is recounting, That Night powerfully represents the loss and longing that ensue from the aging process.

Sherrryyyyy! Young Marlon Brando-like Rick yells outside his girlfriend Sheryl's house, filling the neighborhood with the sound of his cry and creating the scene that dominates Alice McDermott's second novel, That Night. "He stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come … to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands." This scene of violent passion is acted not in the stark...
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