7 minute read
Criticism
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
The 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 105.
The Opiate, Winter Vol. 20 if it took a million friends, a hundred cars, chains the size of boulders. He would make it go back to what it was. She had said it herself, she had promised him: nothing else would matter to them, friends, family, getting older, good luck or bad.” But Sheryl’s promises were not coming entirely from a place of selflessness. Because, to her, loving Rick “forever”—proving that love could last forever—was a way to replace the void left by her father’s premature death, yet another in a series of instances that would shake their usually uneventful Long Island neighborhood. As the principal drives Sheryl home the day her father has a heart attack, his primary consolation is, “Loss is what life’s all about.” Yet Sheryl refuses to believe this. She’s still, despite her adult airs, too young to understand. To let the credence of that statement wash over her. At one point, she asks, “If you knew everybody you loved was just going to end up disappearing, you’d probably say, ‘Why bother, right?’ You’d probably even stop liking people if you knew it wasn’t going to make any difference, they’re just going to eventually disappear. Right?” So it is that she must concoct the idea that there must be an afterlife, a place where she can be reunited with her father and anyone else she’s ever loved, perhaps including Rick if he
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keeps playing it so fast and loose. Sheryl’s inability to fathom neither the loss of someone she loved so dearly nor the notion that with this reality comes the fact that perhaps loving anyone is pointless altogether is further expressed when she bemoans, “I mean how logical is it for you to love somebody and then they just die, like you never existed?
How stupid would it be to keep loving someone who was dead if you were never going to see them again—what do you love, then, air?” When it first came out, That Night was billed by The New York Times as “a kind of elegy, both to childhood in suburbia and the childhood of suburbia.” About the end of an age of innocence briefly maintained by post-WWII sanitization in the U.S. About parents and their hopelessness against protecting their children from the same ills that they suffered, whether enveloped in a so-called protective suburban bubble or not. But more than that, it is a story about surrendering to the reality that “real, Romeo and Juliet” love (“can’t live without each other love,” as Carrie Bradshaw would vexingly call it) is unsustainable. Often, because one of the parties cannot reciprocate the same level of ardor for more than six months to a year, at which point all those vows of “forever” start to feel rather confining. Rather like a death sentence as opposed to a lifelong romance. Reconciling this truth with oneself is, arguably, the entire crux of what it means to transcend into “adulthood,” leaving behind the foolish and fanciful notions of childhood and adolescence. In That Night, Sheryl is the one who seems least likely to let it go as a result of trying to cling to the memory of her father, yet, in the end, she is the first to abandon Rick when a wrench is thrown into their once torrid romance. Something that was manageable in its primordial Capulet-Montague iteration, but then something that becomes untenable when the “little problem” of teen pregnancy emerges. And, without a dad to provide the utmost of disapproval à la “Papa Don’t Preach,” there seems to be an even larger pang of bittersweetness to the revelation: no, love doesn’t last forever, not in its original, most passionate—therefore undiluted— Love’s Labour’s Lost, Or: Alice McDermott’s That Night - Genna Rivieccio form. my parents; love what I come from And now that her father was and what I will, with no more choice dead (or, to boot, now that a brutal or solution, become.” Because, try breakup had ensued), “wouldn’t as we might to shut the door on our her love stop or change, begin even past, to leave where we come from, now slowly to disappear, if what the it always and inevitably comes back principal had told her was true?” She to haunt us in some way. These roots “closed her eyes, refusing to believe it. that can no better be ripped out of us Because how could the daily wash and than a heart out of a chest. Apropos the grocery shopping and the test that of that image, the original cover of the was still unfinished back at school, book—an illustration of a suburban Mrs. Eason and the principal and neighborhood inside of a heart that’s the toddler she sometimes minded all been ripped in half--might come continue to matter when love could across as maudlin to those who don’t so quickly be made pointless? When want to admit to themselves that it love, always, finally, would have to be has always been as Ally Sheedy in The dismantled and unraveled, put away Breakfast Club said (“When you grow and forgotten because it couldn’t up, your heart dies”), but the fact of keep its own object from forever the matter is, there can be no better leaving the earth.” Our narrator’s symbol to represent that everyone, own coming to terms with this sooner or later, must acknowledge apprehension is a result of watching that the naiveté of adolescence with the recipient of her admiration and all of its grand illusions about love fascination go through the innocence- that lasts forever—an understanding shattering moments that seek only to shrouded by the cloak of youth and want to prove that a commitment its ephemeral purity—is destined to to “clutching” to such youthful be as corrupted as a once stainless sentiments as “forever” and “madly suburban neighborhood. in love” will only make it harder on Sheryl speaking of her dad, one in the long run. sounds so certain, so utterly convinced As the narrator finally that love simply must endure. It is a concludes of the events of “that night” conviction that prompts the narrator when Rick and his friends stormed to note, “...her strange assurance: Sheryl’s house in the former’s own It would not be forever. It wasn’t attempt to turn back the hands of possible that people who loved each time to a point when she still wanted other could be apart forever.” Alas, as to keep her promise to him, “It is most of us are fated to discover the only after a certain age, twenty-five hard way, this is very true indeed. or so, when the distance between the child you were and the adult you have become has grown great enough to breed wistfulness, that lovers feel the need to bring one another home. Or perhaps it is only a dare. We have by that time become aware of and even resigned to what part of our parents we will never shake—the receding hairline, the petulance, the inability to say and sincerely mean, ‘It’s only money’—and maybe we bring home this stranger who has claimed love and fidelity simply as a test: love me, love 107.
