Love’s Labour’s Lost, Or: Alice McDermott’s That Night, An Elucidation of How “Growing Up” Means Reconciling That Romeo & Juliet-Level Love Is Pure Myth Genna Rivieccio
T
he Romeo and Juliet narrative has been repurposed in many ways and many times since Shakespeare’s beloved play first hit the stage. For audiences, if nothing else, love a good tale of doomed love. All true love must surely be tragic if it is to be deemed real and “great.” Something about the concept makes it almost too pure, too good for this world. Almost like the love that can perhaps only endure between parent and child. The love between a daughter and her father, as conveyed in Alice McDermott’s 1987 That Night (a book that varied greatly from other releases that year, including Martin Amis’ Einstein’s Monsters, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Stephen King’s Misery). This devoted and unwavering kind of dynamic is framed against the lens of Long Island teenager Sheryl’s first romance with a proverbial boy from
the wrong side of the tracks. Narrated from the perspective of Sheryl’s infatuated younger neighbor, who looks upon the unfolding of events between these two star-crossed lovers (granted, they sound a bit trashier and less attractive than Romeo and Juliet) from afar, the small, sleepy suburban neighborhood of the early 60s era is rocked to its core when the incident that encapsulates the “that night” referred to in the book’s title finds Rick bombarding Sheryl’s house with a group of his, let’s call them, “greaser” friends. He is determined to get her back, to get her to communicate with him again. Alas, he has no awareness that she’s already gone, sent to Ohio to have his baby and give it up for adoption in secret shame. As our ten-year-old narrator describes it, “He would make everything the same, push back time, wrestle whatever had changed to the floor. He didn’t care
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