SOURCE: "Lost Illusions," in The New York Times, March 28, 1987, p. 10.

An American critic, Kakutani is a regular contributor to The New York Times. In the following mixed review of That Night, Kakutani asserts that while McDermott's failure to clarify the relationship between her narrator and the events she recounts proves confusing, this weakness does not diminish the novel's elegiac appeal.

The place is a Long Island suburb: one of those bedroom communities where the men go off to work each day, the women occupy themselves with neighborhood gossip and the kids pass the long summer evenings driving about in their cars and falling in love. The time is the early 1960's—roughly the same space of time chronicled, with such wit and affection, by the movie American Graffiti. It is a time that predates the dark revelations of Vietnam and the noisy rebellions of the late 60's—the...