The Great Night by Chris Adrian is one of my favorite books this year. The story is a contemporary re-telling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in this version three people, each of them weighed down by a failed relationship, stumble through San Francisco’s Buena Vista park on their way to a party. Adrian has broken the novel into five parts (Acts, rather, like Shakespeare’s play) and the reader gets to glimpse into the past of each of the lost, lovesick mortals. On this same night Titania, queen of Faerie, and her subjects are also posed for a celebration—that is, until Titania unleashes the monstrous Puck out of grief and desperation over the loss of her Boy and also to bring back her husband the Faerie king Oberon. And of course A Midsummer Night’s Dream would not be complete without someone playing the part of Bottom. Adrian’s version is Huff, the ridiculous, overconfident leader of a band of homeless actors who are preparing to put on a musical version of Soylent Green.
In my opinion the most beautiful part of the novel is Adrian’s twist on the royal Faerie couple. Titania and Oberon occasionally steal a mortal boy, as faeries do, and he becomes a changeling. It just so happens that the royal Faerie couple becomes particularly attached to one of these changelings and he becomes more than an amusement–he becomes their son, their Boy. Sadly he is diagnosed with cancer, and Adrian’s portrayal of Titania’s and Oberon’s foray into the world of mortal grief and loss is touching and wonderfully imagined.
The Boy’s stay in the hospital was published as the story “A Tiny Feast” in The New Yorker in 2009 (and you can read the whole excerpt online here, if you’d like), and below I’ve included a piece of Adrian’s imagination from that very excerpt that I particularly enjoyed.
“This place is so ugly,” Titania said. “Can anything be done about that?” She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, and a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer.
“I don’t mean the room,” Titania said. “I mean everything else. This whole place. And the people, of course. Where did you find them? Look at you, for instance. Are you deliberately homely? And that Dr. Blork—hideous!”
Alice cocked her head. She did not hear exactly what Titania was saying. Everything was filtered through the same normalizing glamour that hid the light in Titania’s face, that gave her splendid gown the appearance of a tracksuit, that had made the boy appear clothed when they brought him in, when in fact he had been as naked as the day he was born. The same spell made it appear that he had a name, though his parents had only ever called him Boy, never having learned his mortal name, because he was the only boy under the hill. The same spell sustained the impression that Titania worked as a hairdresser, and that Oberon owned an organic orchard, and that their names were Trudy and Bob.
Comments are closed.