Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 2011
The Great Night is Chris Adrian's dizzying bacchanalia set on a midsummer night in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park. Three individuals are on their way to Jordan Sasscock's garden party, each with hopes that this evening will be the night they finally free themselves from the heavy weight of their past heartbreaks. Henry is a pediatric oncologist who has surrounded his life with sadness. His emotional masochism is manifested by an obsessive-compulsive need for cleanliness, tendencies that complicated and ultimately crippled his blissful relationship with his boyfriend Bobby. Will is a doctor of a different sort, answering house calls for people's ailing gardens. During an emergency trip to rescue a diseased sapling, Will meets Caroline, a similarly fractured soul who romantically bonds with Will over their mutual loss of a sibling. Our final wanderer is Molly, who does not directly work in sorrow but lives through it; this night is the first she's been social since the recent suicide of her boyfriend Ryan. Neither Henry, Will nor Molly know specifically what sort of emotional clarity they're seeking, but all three seem fairly certain they'll find it that night at Jordan Sasscock's party.
The Great Night is Chris Adrian's dizzying bacchanalia set on a midsummer night in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park. Three individuals are on their way to Jordan Sasscock's garden party, each with hopes that this evening will be the night they finally free themselves from the heavy weight of their past heartbreaks. Henry is a pediatric oncologist who has surrounded his life with sadness. His emotional masochism is manifested by an obsessive-compulsive need for cleanliness, tendencies that complicated and ultimately crippled his blissful relationship with his boyfriend Bobby. Will is a doctor of a different sort, answering house calls for people's ailing gardens. During an emergency trip to rescue a diseased sapling, Will meets Caroline, a similarly fractured soul who romantically bonds with Will over their mutual loss of a sibling. Our final wanderer is Molly, who does not directly work in sorrow but lives through it; this night is the first she's been social since the recent suicide of her boyfriend Ryan. Neither Henry, Will nor Molly know specifically what sort of emotional clarity they're seeking, but all three seem fairly certain they'll find it that night at Jordan Sasscock's party.
Meanwhile, a strange thread of mischief is blooming through the park. Readers are introduced early in the novel to the protean presence of Titania and Oberon, the queen and king of the fairies who most famously reigned in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Great Night's stunning opening chapters, we first see Titania and Oberon in a hospital room. Titania had previously stolen a mortal boy to delight Oberon, but the boy is dying from leukemia. Adrian conjures these surreal scenes with brutal clarity, as the boy's steadfast mortality is no match for any faerie magic:
"Within a few days the poisons had made him peaceful again. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog... she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy."
The hospital room teems with pixies and brownies, all scrambling to rescue the child by any magical means possible. Yet, somehow this doesn't feel like a fantasy novel. Adrian so perfectly reminds us that even in the realms of the unreal, helpless is helpless; we see Titania and Oberon as mere mortals, as useless and vulnerable to loss as the three wanderers in the park.
"Within a few days the poisons had made him peaceful again. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog... she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy."
The hospital room teems with pixies and brownies, all scrambling to rescue the child by any magical means possible. Yet, somehow this doesn't feel like a fantasy novel. Adrian so perfectly reminds us that even in the realms of the unreal, helpless is helpless; we see Titania and Oberon as mere mortals, as useless and vulnerable to loss as the three wanderers in the park.
The parents lose their boy and their relationship falls apart, and in a vengeful fit of mourning Titania releases the satyr Puck in an attempt to cope with her recent, overwhelming pain. Naturally, the world of mortals and faeries overlap as the heartsick youths unsuspectingly wander into a maze of faerie magic. With their heads full of faerie wine, Will, Molly and Henry find their lives entangled in a twist of limbs and memories as they each approach a "final florid breakdown."
Yet, so quick bright things come to confusion. As the characters in The Great Night further delve into the secret depths of Buena Vista Park's green world, Adrian curiously pulls readers through the perverted recesses of each of their minds. In an attempt to find the natural, base connection between these three lives, Adrian settles upon sex and animal carnality as a hidden unifier. For a book that begins with such heartbreakingly beautiful complexity, the orgiastic results feel more disenchanting then they do bacchanalian. The Great Night is beautifully staged but not as well executed, and by the end of the novel Adrian seems to be grasping at closure with the same intoxicated grabs that his characters reach for each other.
Yet, so quick bright things come to confusion. As the characters in The Great Night further delve into the secret depths of Buena Vista Park's green world, Adrian curiously pulls readers through the perverted recesses of each of their minds. In an attempt to find the natural, base connection between these three lives, Adrian settles upon sex and animal carnality as a hidden unifier. For a book that begins with such heartbreakingly beautiful complexity, the orgiastic results feel more disenchanting then they do bacchanalian. The Great Night is beautifully staged but not as well executed, and by the end of the novel Adrian seems to be grasping at closure with the same intoxicated grabs that his characters reach for each other.
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