SOURCE: "Families," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXIII, No. 26, August 17, 1987, pp. 71-2.

In the excerpt below, Balliett, an American critic who frequently writes about jazz, praises McDermott's use of language and pacing in That Night.

Novels were once panoramas, chronicles, labyrinths, whole subcontinents. A novel seemed to expand and multiply as it was read. But the movies have taken over those comprehensive tasks, and the novel has increasingly been made out of glimpses, incidents, small happenings. Its scope has become vertical rather than horizontal. Alice McDermott's That Night is centered on a single incident—a brief, dangerous, clumsy fight that takes place between some teen-agers and some grown men in a Long Island suburb in the early sixties. (American genre novels were once set on a variety of frontiers—the prairies, the lower East Side, the Maine woods, the upper East Side, and slow Southern dirt roads. But...