Customer Reviews

The Great Night: A Novel

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It feels like there's been a lot of critical hoopla about this book on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm not altogether sure why.
As a literary mash up it's fun - but there are too many times when the book feels like Armistead Maupin meets Lewis Carroll meets Tony Kushner with a smattering of Dickens and Oliver Twist thrown on top. The digressions digress. And the central narrative isn't that interesting. And the all too knowing San Francisco references grate fast (nothing dates faster than knowingness).
Chris Adrian is at his best (as he was in The Children's Hospital) when he sticks most truly to what he knows all too well from real life - the unwonted miseries and love-in-pain that marks out lives that have done nothing to deserve it. But he doesn't do whimsy well and the fantasy sections drag. This might have been a great novella - maybe two - but not a novel.

In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped "A Midsummer Night's Dream," into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering re-imagining of Shakespeare's comedy into an elaborate feast of faeries and monsters, Lilliputians and giants, demons and derelicts, heart-broken humans and a group of outspoken homeless people who are staging a musical reenactment of Soylent Green. And that is just a segment of the odd population of characters that you will meet in this multiple narrative tale of loss, love and exile. As you enter San Francisco's Buena Vista Park during this millennial summer solstice, the moon shines eerie and luminous over creatures large and small, and a thick wall of fog sluggishly spreads its fingers during the celebration known to the faerie kingdom as the "Great Night."

Adrian's fantasy adventure expands on his short story, "A Tiny Feast," centering on King Oberon and the ruthless Queen Titania and their changeling son, Boy, who suffered from leukemia. At the start of this novel, Titania is inconsolable after the death of Boy and the subsequent departure of Oberon. She unleashes a malevolent, ancient force of magic by removing the controlling constraints of Puck, thereby allowing his demonic urges to run rampant through the park.

Meanwhile, three heartbroken people with sorrowful memories of forsaken loved ones are lost and trapped in the park on their way to a summer solstice party. The tangled back stories unleash the bitter coils of pain and loss, and the mortals and immortals eventually interlock with loose springs.

Molly grew up in a pious, gospel-singing family, fuel for unresolved trauma that preys on her like a ghost, and she remains stuck and heartsick over the suicide of her lover, Ryan. Will is a tree surgeon who was dumped by Carolina, the only woman he has ever loved. Henry has a black past with memory holes; he was abducted as a child and has forgotten the terror of those years. Meanwhile, his obsessive cleaning and hand washing, which serves him well as a physician, has cost him a relationship with pediatrician Bobby, the man of his dreams who is now his ex-boyfriend.

Adrian flashes backward into the lives of the mortal three and alternates that with the captivity at the park and the faerie kingdom tale. There were shades of John Crowley's Little, Big, as both books use some similar unrealistic elements and fantasy to enhance the realistic elements and emotional heft. However, Crowley's faeries are more subtle and subconscious, and don't violate the moral codes of humanity as wickedly as Adrian's. Crowley also combines a Carrollian and Dickensian wit and artistry that would have been welcome in Adrian's story.

The essential problem with this book is that the fantastic elements are crowded with too much symbolism and disorder, and getting a purchase on the concepts is slippery. The visual surrealism, rather than plunging the story seamlessly to a deeper consciousness, began to pile up and distract from the story. The action and commotion of the faeries often proved bewildering, and the reading experience was cerebral and exhausting. Adrian's narrative was too loose and boggy to stay engaged.

I was taken with his scuttling energy and the peering furtive faces, and felt the oppressive weight of the shadowed victims. But I was also dizzy, blindfolded and drugged by too much screwball humor adjacent to tragedy, and the clarity was muddied. Adrian's prose is rich and layered with multiple motifs. It was eventually difficult to identify the core of the story. The fate of Molly, Will, and Henry was subverted by an anticlimactic ending amid black humor and zany twists of immortal madcap magic and erotic mayhem.

However, the story resonated at many turns. There is a bizarre and churlish glee to the prose and a willingness to take the reader to unknown zones of scary emotional wilderness. Despite the novel's flabby focus, I shall inevitably look for more of this esteemed "20 under 40" writer's works in the future. He captivates with his perversely baroque and insane merriment.

This review is based on the hardcover edition received from the publisher.

I've said before on this blog that there are often gaps between how good something is and how much I enjoy it. Usually this means that I find great pleasure reading something without particularly high technical merit. In this case, I think it's the opposite. I can appreciate that this is, for a certain literary set, well-written. I'm just not as fond of it as I might be.

'The Great Night' is a modernised retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco in 2008. A group of humans stumble into a disaster implemented by the Faery Queen, Titania, who is in the throes of deep sorrow. Following the death of their latest changeling child, Titania and Oberon had one of their marital spats -- but this time, Oberon doesn't seem to be coming back. Desperate to get the King to show himself and so absorbed with her grief that she loses all sensibility, Titania lifts the controlling enchantment off of Puck, also known as the Beast, freeing him to wreak havoc in the park. (The greater world is protected by walls of air -- nothing, mundane or fantastical, gets in our out of the park while those walls, presumably conjured by Oberon, are up). The mortals trapped within are: Molly, recovering from the suicide of her boyfriend; Will, in love with a strange woman who dumped him a year ago; Henry, who can't remember any of his life before the age of thirteen, and whose obsessive-compulsive habits drove away his boyfriend; and a group of homeless people rehearsing for a musical version of Soylent Green, led by Huff, who believes the Mayor of San Francisco is feeding the indigent population to each other in the soup kitchens. These mortals get wound up in the actions of the faeries, who are either giving over to sensual indulgence in what they presume to be their last hours, or who are seeking ways to put the Beast back under control.

There are things about this book which are really great. It's definitely at its best when the faeries are the main focus. Titania and Oberon are sweeping, dramatic figures, and Adrian describes the lesser faeries in a way that balances nicely between whimsical and grotesque. The flashback section where Titania and Oberon have to watch their changeling child die is the strongest portion of the book. Because their magic cannot work on anything they care for, they have to turn to human medicine to try and save the Boy. They're also struggling to deal with the emotional consequences of actually caring for a mortal child, as their self-absorption usually prevents such deep attachments to their changelings. Adrian does a great job showing how mortals perceive the faeries when they enter the mundane world, how the little magics affect them. He also -- through his own background as a pediatrician -- is able to evoke the tormented feelings of parents watching a child die with great sympathy and precision. The emotionality of this section is strong and compelling, and it paints a very clear picture.

As for the humans, their stories generally start off well enough -- Molly, Will, and Henry, at least, inhabit complex emotional and psychological worlds. Huff and his tribe I could have done without. They seemed extraneous, none of them besides Huff developed any real personality, and I can't figure out the purpose of the Soylent Green trope. Not having enough of a familiarity with that source material, I don't know if there's some larger theme at work there, or if the fixation is just a way to demonstrate the extent of Huff's delusions. Regardless, it seems like that subplot only exists as a tacked-on way to have an analog for the Mechanicals, so that Titania has a fool to dote on when the Beast places her under an enchantment. But the lover-analogs are fascinating, if not wholly likeable. They all enter the story in liminal states, hedging between decisions, scared to take decisive action in controlling their lives, hesitant and varying degrees of pathetic. In this way, they're precisely the opposite of Shakespeare's lovers, who take to the woods for very specific reasons, but their ambiguity serves the opening of the story, because it makes them vulnerable to ethereal interference.

The second half of the book degrades into confused chaos, though. As the humans fall deeper under the faeries' spell, the narrative quickly becomes jumbled and hazy. Molly and Will, whose stories had been compelling, get lost entirely in the enchanted shuffle. Henry's experience is only somewhat clearer. The reader does learn some more pieces of the backstory, some threads that tie these seemingly unrelated people together, but there's no real sense of a greater point to it, no driving force behind what's happening, and no ultimate goal for them to work towards.

And perhaps that's all to the author's purpose. Perhaps that chaos is precisely what Adrian is aiming for, to portray the senselessness of the whirlwind the Beast creates. Which is why I say, if that's the case, then it's extremely well-done. But even well-done, it interfered with my ability to enjoy the book. I like a good, solid story, some sense of cohesion, which 'The Great Night' lacks. As the mortals falls deeper into the madness of the night, their experiences become clogged with symbolism. Adrian takes it a step too far, I think, laying the metaphors on a bit too thick, and the story loses both coherence and emotional engagement as a result. Certain sections also edge into what I would consider pointlessly pornographic territory. I'm no prude and I'm certainly not against sex in literature, but so much of it felt like Adrian inserted it into the story just so he could shockingly juxtapose crude earthiness with the idea of the faery magic, or just so he had an excuse to jar the reader with naughty words. It's yet another discordant thread -- perhaps intentional, but it didn't particularly serve the story.

The ending of the book is a problem. Abrupt and anticlimactic, it circumvents any kind of resolution for the characters. The mortals' stories, set up so well at the beginning, reach no conclusion. They don't even move along -- we don't see any indication that they've been changed by their time in the woods, that they'll go back to real life different than before, because we don't see them at the end. There's no sense of alteration or growth. No one has a dramatic arc except Titania, perhaps, and even her story ends ambiguously, with no denouement. Adrian throws the reader into a maelstrom and then never calms the seas. Again, this confusion might be intentional, but it's unsatisfying.

Ultimately, I'm glad I read this book. I always enjoy seeing how other writers interpret Shakespearean themes, and sections of 'The Great Night' are quite strong and worth reading. The story as a whole, however, just doesn't hang together. The disparate threads never reconnect, too many characters never reach resolution, and too much seems extraneous. 'The Great Night' is an interesting experiment, but the book would have profited from more tightening and precision.

My brief take on Chris Adrian's The Great Night is that you should save your time.

The book has a really interesting concept (retelling A Midsummer Night's Dream set in modern-day San Francisco), but the actual story falls flat. It's hard to one-up Shakespeare, and Adrian didn't manage it. The plots don't overlap well, the characters aren't all that compelling (and they don't grow), and the ending left me wanting more--but not in a good way. I didn't feel like the story had resolved. Shakespeare doesn't leave you feeling like the story's not over; Adrian does.
A Midsummer Night's Dream has three main plots: The Wedding, The Play, and The Dream. The Great Night has a two plots attempting to be three, but they don't mesh. Even as I read, I lost track of the different plots and characters, they were so disconnected. I'll try to keep track of the threads here.

The story takes place in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco on Midsummer Eve 2008.

First the humans. Molly is mourning the death-by-suicide of her boyfriend. Will has been dumped by his girlfriend, whose brother (Molly's boyfriend) committed suicide. Henry is a doctor with OCD and a mysterious past. Seriously mysterious: a chunk of his childhood is a black hole in his memory. Henry has also recently broken up with his boyfriend. See the theme? They're all lovelorn. Then we have a group of homeless people (who are supposed to parallel the "rude mechanicals" of Shakespeare's version) who, on coming to the "realization" that the mayor is feeding homeless people to the homeless people, decide to stage a musical version of Soylent Green in protest to this forced cannibalism.

Meanwhile, we have the fairy element of the story: Titania, her fairy followers, Puck and, in absentia, Oberon. Titania is distraught at Oberon's defection. (He apparently left her after their changeling child died of leukemia. No, that didn't happen in Shakespeare. Adrian apparently wrote a short story about this and made that part of this story. Hence one of the big continuity errors between his work and Shakespeare's.) In her despair, she decides to release Puck from the magical binding that she & Oberon had placed him under (that's another one from Adrian's short story, so don't worry when you can't find that part in the original). Puck, mischievous elf that he is, doesn't settle for helping Titania. He also decides to wreak some havoc while he's around. He puts an invisible wall around the park so no one can get in or out, and he spends his time attacking, maiming, and otherwise having his fun. No, I don't remember Puck being violent and bloodthirsty either. Apparently Adrian decided to use his poetic license.

Anyway, the story flashes around from the fairy's story to Molly/Will/Henry's story(ies) to the homeless guys' story, never coming together. I kept thinking that the book would end up being good, but when I finally finished, I realized that I had wasted hours of my life that I'll never get back. I held out hope till the end. It could have been redeemed with some good up-wrapping denoument at the finish! Until the very last page, I thought I might get a sense of how the whole thing went together. But no. Adrian took the easy route and resolved the story in a weak, unsatisfying whimper.

Near the end of Chris Adrian's latest novel, one of the characters sends an important message to a former lover. As the character struggles to put what needs to be said into words, the messenger offers a suggestion: "There is magic!" Given the knowledge that the messenger in question is a squirrel, what follows ("Exactly! [the other] said. And then: No, no... there is love! That's what I mean to say. Or did he mean magic?") suggests something important about the book's fantastic elements. It isn't so much that the magic is only a metaphor as that it is, in the final analysis, no more of a marvel than anything else, a marker of the novel's membership in the great family of contemporary fiction that, awestruck at the wonder and horror of the world, can only describe those highs and lows, as if to say "Here's life! Ain't it a thing?"

In this loose retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, there are in place of the two mismatched couples three "brokenhearted" people. Henry's obsessive-compulsive behavior has driven away Bobby; Will's initially unspecified failings ended his relationship with Carolina; Molly is, after two years, still reeling from Ryan's suicide. Also in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park this fateful night are a group of homeless who have conceived an unlikely explanation for a recent spate of disappearances, and concocted an even more unlikely show to put a stop to them. The rehearsal of these rude mechanicals is interrupted by faeries in flight from Puck, here no gentle trickster but a force of unstoppable violence. Puck has been released from his binding enchantments by a Titania so stricken with grief, for a changeling child who died of leukemia and for the missing Oberon, that she scarcely cares whether Puck's freedom will bring on Oberon's return, a violent massacre, or both.

All this would seem the setup a complicated and lively narrative, but in fact the depth and power of The Great Night is in the flashbacks that establish how Molly, Will, Henry, Titania, and Oberon have been brought to their present unhappiness. The titular night provides more of a linking novella, and not a terribly eventful one at that, although Adrian's faeries, charming and amusing without becoming intolerably cute, offer in a few lively passages. The flashbacks, some laced with fantasy, some not, often make for deeply moving short stories in and of themselves. (At least one has been separately published, an account of the changeling child's illness and death that juxtaposes Oberon and Titania's grandeur with the mortal misery of a children's cancer ward. The effect is alternately comic and heart-rending, with no excess sentimentality.) But, despite gradually-revealed connections among the protagonists, the flashbacks are too wide-ranging and scattered for the novel to achieve full coherence, and the chronological gaps between them mean that the human characters are too imperfectly seen to generate the level of involvement necessary for novelistic effect. The rude mechanicals in particular are diverting but poorly integrated into the larger concept, and the others are often sympathetic but rarely compelling.

What makes The Great Night a rewarding experience in spite of its larger failures is Adrian's gift for writing about human frailty and yearning in a way that makes the non-fantastic elements of the story as hauntingly magical as the faeries and their spells. From Molly's childhood in a Christian family band to Will's career as an arborist and short story writer to Henry's neurotic need to clean, the personal histories are uncommon, eccentric, but recognizable as versions of the near-universal desire for community, and of the guilt and shame brought on by failed attempts to connect. These small tragedies ring truer than the novel's flights of optimism, including the climax, which is strikingly described and makes a certain mythic sense, but leaves behind the logic of human motivations in a forced, abrupt manner. Magic may be wonderful, and love too, but this vision never becomes quite clear. Despite a refreshing acknowledgement of the importance and wonder of sexual pleasure, the romances are described without much insight into anything beyond the hollow intensity of infatuation. Adrian's most natural mode is not grandeur, but its echo: the broken relationship, the lost sibling, the melancholy fate of former changelings. There is still beauty in such things, of course, a terrible beauty, and flashes of it, like lightning strikes, grace this long night with an intermittent but potent illumination.

Something is gloriously, tragically amiss in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park. In fact, to mix my Shakespeare quotes, something wicked this way comes. It's also something strange and chaotic and deeply human.

Chris Adrian's The Great Night is billed as a reimagining of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which isn't quite right. This is far closer to a sequel or at least a jumping-off point. Unlike the merry mayhem of Shakespeare's beloved comedy, The Great Night is, above all else, a tragedy. The book uses the well-known faerie characters to spin tales of heartbreak, tracing the pasts of each of the five main actors (three single mortals, Titania the faerie queen, and the "rude mechanicals," here represented by a group of homeless people), showing us their origins, their intersections, and, ultimately, their fates. Much remains mysterious at first, which makes this a real page-turner. You want to know what's happened to these lovely, broken people, and what will happen to them if Puck wins the night.

As it turns out, Puck is not that, well, puckish creature you remember from outdoor summer stagings of the play. He is an ancient menace, deeply powerful--perhaps unstoppable. Adrian delivers him as a palpably dangerous villain and the terror he inspires in the faerie court creates jittery suspense for the present-day part of the narrative. Just as splendid is Adrian's Titania. Her tragedy is at once immediate and distant. She finds herself mired in the horrors of the contemporary world: a child lost to leukemia whom modern medicine could not save, a husband who has left her, possibly for good. Both concepts -- disease/death and loss of love -- are foreign to her, and one of the best parts of the story. The modern world is as strange and mystical to the faeries as their world is to us, and each side's inability to deal with the other's mystery makes for excellent reading.

The human aspects of the story are as important as the chaotic faerie framework. Each of the three singular characters comes from a very different background, but each intersects with the others in wonderful and unexpected ways. Their stories and their heartbreaks twin with the faerie tragedy unfolding incomprehensibly around them, and their reactions to the magic and to each other are wonderful. The group of homeless fares less well: they feel dropped into the story because there must be rude mechanicals.

At times it feels like Adrian is trying to do too much, which is perhaps not surprising, given the number of characters and plots and intrigues going on here. The visual descriptions, however, are stunning, and work to anchor us within the surreal world of the park. This phantasmagorical, often sad, often funny, very scary tale is a mind-full. While it stumbles at times in pacing and characterization, its heaps of tragic, magical, surreal narrative are definitely worth spending a great night (or three) with.

~*~

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I think this is Adrian's best yet. It immediately draws you into a story that brings to mind a dance where the dancers' movements create a lovely pattern on the floor. The story weaves tighter and tighter as it progresses. All are wounded, all who can start to heal. And the faeries provide the element of wonder that makes you smile with longing to be there. Read this book.

I first read a piece of this book in the New Yorker -- the chapter about Titania and Oberon enduring their foundling son's death in a San Francisco leukemia ward -- and I felt it was one of the most wonderful,hilarious, and heart-breaking things I'd ever read. A year or two later I picked up this novel, not recognizing the author's name and thinking, if only it were a tenth as great as that story. In fact that story nestles inside this book like a jewel in a fabulous cave of firelit chambers, twisting pathways, shimmering stalactites, glimmering pools, and astonishing treasures of every description. The author is brilliant -- his concept, his prose, his characters, his pacing, his dread-filled atmosphere, and especially his outsized and outlandish generosity in offering such a big vision. There are surprises at every turn. I won't give away the ending, but I cried. Loved this book.

In Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Oberon and Titania quarrel over possession of a little Indian Boy adopted by the fairy queen. In Chris Adrian's GREAT NIGHT, they part in recrimination and anger after the slow death of their boy through leukemia. Fantasy or not, it is a surprisingly moving situation; only when looking at the back cover flap did I realize that Adrian's own day job is as a pediatric oncologist. It gave the book a contact with real human suffering, and also with a kind of macabre humor that is apparently often found among doctors who work with the innocent and the dying.

Suffering and the macabre are certainly ingredients of the rest of the novel, which is a reworking of Shakespeare's play in a San Francisco boutique park (Adrian's term), but I found it very difficult to connect with the humanity. There are a number of characters, all with common first names -- Henry, Will, Molly -- mourning the loss of someone close to them -- Bobby, Caroline, Ryan. These become involved with similarly one-named fairies -- Oak, Fell, Lyon -- and a group of street people who are rehearsing a protest musical -- Huff, Bob, Mary, Princess, and Hogg. The wild mixture of names (and these are added to and changed as easily as the enchanted characters change their shape) is surely intentional, and many of the characters will turn out to be interconnected in surprising ways, but it made it difficult for me to feel close even to the three main people as human beings. Setting his story in San Francisco, Adrian gave himself an exotic palette to paint with: sexuality, for example, of several different flavors and rapidly increasing frequency. The coupling (Adrian uses a less polite word) of so many interchangeable bodies did nothing for me except make me read faster and faster -- though I will admit that fantasy is not my genre.

Shakespeare, to be fair, does not give much character to his lovers either, cycling them through just about every combination before finally matching them correctly. His coupling, poetic rather than physical, is surely intended to demonstrate the fungibility of sexual attraction, but its ultimate function is to heal; it looks toward a future. Adrian's subject, though, is loss, and he looks back to the past; most of the real episodes in the novel are flashbacks to the earlier lives of the three central characters. While I learned more about them, I found it increasingly hard to care, and was ultimately unconvinced that they learned much about themselves, but that was largely because the thickets of the nightmare remained impenetrable.

Maybe I expected too much, seeking Shakespeare's humor and grace rather than Adrian's heavy-handed grotesquerie. Angela Carter, another writer with a touch for dark fantasy, has a brilliant riff on the play in her story collection SAINTS AND STRANGERS, where it is seen from the point of view of the Indian Boy. Making his Boy die in futility and pain, Adrian certainly writes with authenticity, but these are bitter qualities for an entire novel.

I'm writing this in the spirit of Elif Batuman's campaign to write 5-star reviews of book she loves, especially books which fare better at the hands of critics than at the hands of Amazon reviewers.

I have reasons of my own for relating strongly to this book, but even without those I would find it an astonishing performance. After reading Part One through tears, I was cringing & holding my breath, waiting for the book to disappoint me in its technique or plot or tone, but it never failed.

I enjoy a fractured puzzle-plot (unlike the other reviewers). I love magic realism [for lack of a better term]. I love the silly-but-serious characters of Huff & Princess, of Oak, Fell, & Lyon, and their gems of bizarre dialogue. But what I love most is how Chris Adrian marshalls his entire bag of tricks (his "disguising glamour") in the service of a few core stories about incredibly real & true loss. It's funny and creepy and so sad, and yes, you have to work a little to reconstruct the story he flings out. I am so happy I read it.