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A review by srbender1
The Great Night by Chris Adrian
2.0
Chris Adrian is clearly an intelligent and creative author with his words and their combinations. He writes his characters with beautiful detail and heartbreaking insight. However, the over arching narrative was jumbled and broken. Often important events of in the plot were skimmed over, like a writer that forgets his audience isn't inside his head. The magical element was not as interesting as I anticipated and the climax moment (although unexpected) was reinforced only through quick changes between character voice. The description of the novel was so enticing, yet I was overall disappointed. Perhaps the most redeeming element of the book happens in the beginning with a description of a parents struggle through a child's leukemia treatment.
I was hoping for more connection to Shakespeare's Midsummer. There were elements that referenced to the play, but his use of the characters were classically defined as new media that conglomerates and fuses the new to the old. More importantly, this book should be put in the genre of San Francisco literature, as it felt very local in both the settings and the topic.
Themes explored: loss, sexuality, self-definition, magic v. reality
"Titania was the only one among them ever to have ridden on a roller coaster, but she didn't offer up the experience as an analogy, because it seemed insufficient to describe a process that to her felt less like a violent unpredictable ride and more like someone ripping out your heart on one day and then stuffing it back into your chest the next."
"Other people had become a whole lot more interesting since he had been freed from the labyrinthine solipsism of his self-enforced misery"
"Henry had done just the opposite thing, it seemed to him, falling every day more deeply into love while Bobby lifted himself ever higher out of it, until they could not possibly have been farther away from each other"
"He could not eat a cream puff without considering how it was filled to bursting with cream the way he was filled to bursting with love for her. Meta-pastries like these were obvious, and even pathetic, and generated by the worst part of him, not the best."
"He was just the handsome tricycle the world meant her to pedal a few yards down the road to recovery, and once she saw that she could see he wasn't actually necessary to the work. She could just like here and transport herself, by force of will, those same few yards."
"Henry had trouble trusting pediatricians who couldn't laugh at a nice dead-baby joke; it suggested to him somehow that they weren't sufficiently traumatized by their common experience."
I was hoping for more connection to Shakespeare's Midsummer. There were elements that referenced to the play, but his use of the characters were classically defined as new media that conglomerates and fuses the new to the old. More importantly, this book should be put in the genre of San Francisco literature, as it felt very local in both the settings and the topic.
Themes explored: loss, sexuality, self-definition, magic v. reality
"Titania was the only one among them ever to have ridden on a roller coaster, but she didn't offer up the experience as an analogy, because it seemed insufficient to describe a process that to her felt less like a violent unpredictable ride and more like someone ripping out your heart on one day and then stuffing it back into your chest the next."
"Other people had become a whole lot more interesting since he had been freed from the labyrinthine solipsism of his self-enforced misery"
"Henry had done just the opposite thing, it seemed to him, falling every day more deeply into love while Bobby lifted himself ever higher out of it, until they could not possibly have been farther away from each other"
"He could not eat a cream puff without considering how it was filled to bursting with cream the way he was filled to bursting with love for her. Meta-pastries like these were obvious, and even pathetic, and generated by the worst part of him, not the best."
"He was just the handsome tricycle the world meant her to pedal a few yards down the road to recovery, and once she saw that she could see he wasn't actually necessary to the work. She could just like here and transport herself, by force of will, those same few yards."
"Henry had trouble trusting pediatricians who couldn't laugh at a nice dead-baby joke; it suggested to him somehow that they weren't sufficiently traumatized by their common experience."