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 setting of A Streetcar Named Desire but in the bucolic nest of the American Dream. The haunting cry of loss is set against the "staccato hum" of lawn mowers and "the collective gurgle of filters in backyard pools." These are suburbs transformed by love: "Venus was there," we are told, and what seems at first to be a teenage sex story turns into an engrossing tale about loss and fulfillment, memory and illusion.

Rick is bellowing outside Sheryl's house because he hasn't been able to see her. He and his friends have arrived in a convoy of "hot rods" to get Sheryl and "kill that old bitch" (Sheryl's widowed mother). Rick's mother has often unexpectedly left home to go into mental institutions, and Rick sees the same thing in Sheryl's disappearance: he fears she has changed into another person overnight. He doesn't know that Sheryl is pregnant and has been sent to relatives in Ohio to have the baby. At the sound of Rick's cry, the story's narrator (an unnamed woman, now an adult, looking back nostalgically on her childhood) says that her "ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all."

McDermott's first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, explored the way people use fictions to hide or transform the defeats and banalities of their lives. Elizabeth, an editor of a vanity press, tells her lover a story of a past love affair and attempts to transform herself and the affair through embellishments in her retelling. By the end of that novel, Elizabeth is more comfortable with unadorned reality. In That Night McDermott goes one step further and introduces a narrator who is both a character within and the creator of the story she tells, and who, also, embellishes her story in an attempt to transform the ordinary into the mythical—thereby revealing the transforming powers of memory and of stories themselves.

The narrator tells us: "It's nostalgia that makes me say it,… but there was no boredom in these suburbs." Yet behind the narrator's purple-tinted memories is routine. The "housebound and yardbound" men of the neighborhood cry out for something more. When Rick comes to take Sheryl, they emerge as protectors carrying makeshift weapons and clumsily battle the teenage boys. After the fight, pulled together in their new role, the men gather, "heady with the taste of their own blood," to "reenact in slow, stylized motion the blows they'd given, the blows they had received, adding now the grace that had been missing from the original performance, the witty dialogue, the triumph." Even the narrator is disappointed in their performance: she expected D'Artagnan.

The irony is sometimes cruel. McDermott seems closer to the women in her story: she takes us into their houses and exposes the painful realities of maintaining the dream of suburban life. The neighbors find a utopia in the home of Mrs. Carpenter's family. The upstairs of the Carpenter house, the "enchanted, mist-shrouded heights," is the model of suburban decoration. The family lives in the basement. Mrs. Carpenter ("more artist than eccentric") has created "Beauty" she hopes to save from "the ravages of … ash-dropping Time":

The master bedroom was a sultan's palace, deep green and pink and silver with drapes hanging where there weren't even windows. Not a thing out of place, not a thing that didn't match. A gold swan spouting water in the bathroom sink, its wings Hot and Cold.

The narrator's mother comes back from a tour of the upstairs "holding her heart" and saying there is "nothing else like it in the world. The shine on the dining room table was blinding." Mrs. Carpenter sits in this pathetic paradise with "the bored distracted air of someone simply waiting to see how things turn out."

Sheryl's untimely pregnancy is set against some of the neighborhood women's pathetic attempts at conception, with their "voodoo" rituals—"hot water douches and citrus diets and intercourse performed with your head and throat hanging off the side of the bed." The narrator realizes that what her own mother is really attempting to conceive is "insurance" against the invalidity of her own existence. Leela, a friend of the narrator's mother, tries all of the above remedies, and says to her husband that if she fails she is "neither male nor female; I cannot know my worth."

While the women inside engage in their nightly gymnastics, Sheryl and Rick are making love in a park, a forest-like setting where, like Hawthorne's lovers in A Scarlet Letter, they can obliterate the world beyond. The narrator, as a child, is lucky enough to have a visit from the mysterious older Sheryl, who helps her dress a Barbie doll and who tells her, "I know all those things that other people think are important come down to nothing. They disappear." If Rick, Sheryl tells her, "had died before he met me, everybody … would have forgotten about him…. But I wouldn't forget." These words echo when the narrator lets us in on the scene in the park: "Sheryl would whisper, 'Before me you would have been forgotten.'" As the narrator tells it, these teenagers making love in a park are one with the natural world: "Perhaps by then he understood only that when she spoke of dying he should turn to her, loosen the scarf at her throat … gently push her back onto the grass." But reality breaks in on this idyll; later, in Ohio, Sheryl's cousin Pam, a plump, happily married housewife and mother, tells her that she too was in love like Sheryl, and that "what seems like a terrible loss to you now will only seem natural…."

McDermott disappoints our expectations in the same way. The narrator takes us into the future beyond "that night" as the neighbors gather for a funeral. They look back wistfully at the young couple and the events of the night. Sheryl, a skinny girl with a flat round face—who wears Banlon sweaters, Woolworth scarves, and too much pancake makeup and black eyeliner, and who carries a turquoise comb in her pocket—is remembered as being as beautiful as a Miss America contestant. Though she ends up married with "two kids and a house and all," the women of the neighborhood "had hoped or imagined something more for Sheryl," more than "a life like theirs." Rick, whose youthful role has been that of passionate lover—a suburban Stanley Kowalski—grows to be an ordinary, nondescript family man with two kids.

Rick's cry, taken up by the whole neighborhood in "one, inharmonious wail," is the cry of loss answered by illusion. Suburbia has created its own romantic myth, one of cozy security: "Under the moon and the stars, there were identical rooftops and chimneys and TV antennas, no minarets or onion domes, and the trees that caught and muffled the lamplight were ordinary oak and maple." Yet things still happen there. Fathers die on their way to work, children are killed, and love is made powerless. On the way home from the hospital where Sheryl has left her baby behind, she gains comfort from the "blind, insistent longing that this emptiness be filled again."

The narrator provides potent ironies about the disillusionment of "coming of age," but her voice is sometimes a hindrance. It keeps us too distant from the other characters, too close to her, and at times the narrator's personal asides are more distraction than illumination. But this is minor, and doesn't diminish the novel's power significantly. McDermott's lyrical prose draws us along. The "howling wail" touches us too, and when the narrator says that these suburbs are not boring, we are lured into belief. Embellishing the night by telling us "Venus was there" seems heavy-handed; the moon perhaps would have sufficed. But like the narrator we accept the illusion of Venus and undying love. McDermott's suburbs are about the longing for an "irretrievable past," for the way life was before we knew there was a difference between the life of the basement and the one upstairs.