It is a necessity of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that the human characters stumbling through the play’s ethereal events be interchangeable. Their compatibility serves the comedic as well as thematic aims of the drama, calling attention to the flippancy of attraction while also challenging the very notion of true love. Chris Adrian’s newest novel, The Great Night, begins on a comparable note of character similitude, his three human protagonists all heading toward the same party “at nearly the same time” via the same San Francisco park, each of them severely “brokenhearted.” Subsequently, the three mortals find themselves entangled in the same supernatural catastrophe, a calamity rooted in the grief of Queen Titania, a fairy goddess suffering the recent loss of both a mortal boy she’d come to love and her husband Oberon. The immediate consequence of her grief is the freeing of Puck, who in Adrian’s telling is a mischievous spirit ravenous for mayhem.
So begins Chris Adrian’s impressively re-imagined version of Shakespeare’s original comedy, and so begin his attempts to bring these two worlds together, to twist the storylines into a tightly-woven, evocative braid. Yet, as Adrian’s novel is no drama, it does something Shakespeare’s play does not, which is to quickly move toward the particular and specific. Adrian devotes the majority of his three-hundred-plus pages to demonstrating exactly how the human protagonists (Molly, Will, and Henry) are distinct people suffering distinct pains. That character development takes the form of lengthy sections of flashback, all intended to lead the reader up to the current moment of crisis while subtly revealing the ways in which Molly, Will, and Henry are tangentially connected. The individual histories move forward beautifully and effortlessly, coloring characters in a way that drama can’t and only novels can, and at the same time providing a welcomed, weighty counterbalance to the novel’s sometimes comic nature. These characters suffer not only in the fairy world, but in the human world as well, and so the stakes are as emotionally tangible as they are poignant.
If there is a downside to Adrian’s approach it is felt in the dramatic present of the story, the actual Great Night, where those significant pasts remain submerged beneath the drunken stupor of fairy liquor and magic. Molly comes closest in allowing her anguish to influence or affect the events of that strange evening, but on the whole she, Will, and Henry bump into one another without understanding or revelation. They are the pawns of the fairy world and despite the lengths Adrian goes to in depicting their troublesome back stories, their pains prove trivial in the face of the supernatural crisis at hand. Like Shakespeare’s transposable depictions, Adrian’s structure comes at the cost of character authenticity. The playwright’s comedy depends on the exploitation of Lysander and Demetrius, caricatures of human desire, and so they are doomed to blank distinction as Athenian men. Similarly, the present-tense sections of The Great Night, in order to strike a humorous tone, belie and debase the complexity of its human protagonists. Adrian seems to undo his own gorgeous work, the drama-in-progress diminishing the characters he spent so much time giving full form to.
What The Great Night truly seems to be, rather than a re-envisioned Shakespearean play, is a beautiful, ghostly meditation on grief and loss. And this is why Adrian’s finest work is found with Titania, the goddess whose pain is the most gripping amongst the players. What Adrian accomplishes with this demanding, majestic fairy queen is to reaffirm a bit of pride in the power and force of human love. Titania’s own flashbacks (to the hospital when her child was sick, to the moments when she and Oberon fought over the boy, to the boy’s tragic, mortal end) first appeared as a masterfully crafted, stand-alone story, called “A Tiny Feast,” in The New Yorker and highlighted the best of this novel. The scenes in and of themselves are intentionally familiar in their sentimental circumstance, which affords Adrian the opportunity for character nuance and allows him to make a complex, intimate woman out of a distant, removed mythical figure. Titania is, of course, humbled by her loss, but Adrian’s careful attention to the flavor of Titania’s naïve agony renders this recognizable situation new and fascinating. An audience can disregard the fall of the mighty and instead empathize and commune with a bereaved deity.
And that is conceivably Adrian’s ultimate aim: to explore the liminal space between grief and salvation, the shadows between loss and redemption. The world of Buena Vista Park on this night is a mixture of the tangible and the airy. It is a passing landscape that will go with the moon and fade with the hours. It is a place both humans and fairies must venture into and out of, and Adrian is in full control of that reality. Perhaps it is his background as a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology or perhaps it is his previous experience in writing about hospitals and doomed youth (A Better Angel, The Children’s Hospital), but regardless of how, Chris Adrian understands better than most the notion that all love is precious, and mortal or immortal, one always suffers the cost.
Chris Adrian. The Great Night. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hardcover, 309 pp., $26.00.
