A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award It is high summer, the early 1960s. Sheryl and Rick, two Long Island teenagers, share an intense, all-consuming love. But Sheryl's widowed mother steps between them, and one moonlit night Rick and a gang of hoodlums descend upon her quiet neighborhood. That night, driven by Rick's determination to reclaim Sheryl, the young men provoke a violent confrontation, and as fathers step forward to protect their turf, notions of innocence belonging to both sides of the brawl are fractured forever. Alice McDermott's That Night is "a moving and captivating novel, both celebration and elegy…a rare and memorable work" ( The Cleveland Plain Dealer ). “At once mythic and personal---a novel that possesses the ability to make us remember our own youth and all that has vanished since.” ― Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A strong, eloquent novel…McDermott writes clean, simple prose that serves her story beautifully. This novel is as carefully constructed as a poem, giving off a lustrous glow, and is poignant in the telling.” ― People “Voiced with musical economy…the author's perceptions of suburban life have a rich detail of the quality of a Cheever or an Updike.” ― Los Angeles Times “McDermott is a spellbinder, adding a cachet of mystery and eloquence to common occurrences….She has taken a suburban teenage romance and pregnancy and infused it with the power, the ominousness, and the star-crossed romanticism of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet .” ― Chicago Tribune “To enter the world of this incantatory novel is to palpably recall almost against one's will the rash, embattled strivings and disillusionments of first love.” ― The Washington Post Book World Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy , winner of the National Book Award, and That Night , At Weddings and Wakes , and After This , which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction . Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , The New Yorker , Harper’s Magazine , and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. That Night A Novel By Alice McDermott Picador Copyright © 2012 Alice McDermott All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312681166 That Night ONE T hat night when he came to claim her, 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 support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad--the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes--startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call. This is serious , my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane. I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all.Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawingout the word, keening it, his voice both strong and desperate. There was a history of dark nights in the sound, something lovely, something dangerous.One of the children had already begun to cry.It was high summer, the early 1960s. The sky was a bright navy above the pitched roofs and the thick suburban trees. I hesitate to say that only Venus was bright, but there it was. I had noticed it earlier, when the three cars that were now in Sheryl's driveway and up on her lawn had made their first pass through our neighborhood. Add a thin, rising moon if the symbolism troubles you: Venus was there.Across the street, a sprinkler shot weak sprays of water, white in the growing darkness. Behind the idling motors of the boys' cars you could still hear the collective gurgle of filters in backyard pools. Sheryl's mother had already been pulled from the house, and she crouched on the grass by the front steps saying over and over again, "She's not here. She's gone." The odor of their engines was like a gash across the ordinary summer air.He called her again, doubled over now, crying, I think. Then he pitched forward, his boot slipping on the grass, so it seemed for a second he'd be frustrated even in this, and once again ran toward the house. Sheryl's mother cowered. The men and the boys met awkwardly on the square lawn.Until then, I had thought all violence was swift and surefooted, somehow sleek, even elegant. I was surprised to see how poor it really was, how laborious and hulking. I saw one of the men bend under the blow of what seemed a slow-moving chain, and then, just