She laughed and so did he. Hints of the old Odette. Temperaments never change. We are what we were, only in old bodies, he thought.As a retired widower who has recently suffered the devastating loss of his beloved daughter, James Hillyer endures loneliness and insomnia. Laying awake one night, he remembers a girl he knew briefly, sixty-two years earlier, and resolves to attempt to find her. And find her, he does. Nightfall begins with an Author's Note, explaining that Richard B. Wright included long passages from his earlier novel October, “in the hope that they will clarify the relationship between James and Odette at quite different stages in their lives”. So technically, Nightfall is a sequel, an update, and at 170ish pages, a brief one at that. Having not read the earlier work, I can report that this book indeed stands on its own; and now having finished this one, I have little desire to go back to the other.
I found the passages lifted from October – which could run for several pages – to be the most interesting part of this book; perhaps because Wright was forced to so carefully select which snippets could represent the whole of that short friendship from long ago. In the present, as James and Odette attempt to reconnect, the action is jumpy and each speaks in longish monologues. There are a few other characters introduced – an estranged son, a dependent sister, a dangerous ex – and while they flesh out the pair's histories, they're not very interesting on their own. There is a brief spell of tension in the plot, but no surprises. I was often bored, even in a three hour read.
I remember that after I read Clara Callan, I was one of the few dissenters who didn't think much of that book; it might well be that I'm an outlier with this one, too. Perhaps you'll love Nightfall if you've enjoyed Wright's earlier novels – and especially if you were enchanted by October and always wondered what became of James and Odette and Gilbert – but this was just okay for me.
My younger brother Kyler is a lifelong resister of feminism. Having been a little boy at the height of the bra burning hoopla (whether or not bras were actually burnt, it was a constant topic in the air), Kyler has always sneered at what he thinks of as women complaining that they are special victims or that they need special protection against "the patriarchy"; a type of conspiracy thinking that he has never had time for. I remember, when we were both young teenagers, Kyler getting mad at those Secret deodorant commercials on TV ("strong enough for a man but made for a woman"), him ranting that women think they're so special, needing special deodorant and everything. I remember my disbelief and pointing out to him that it wasn't women asking for anything "special", men's and women's bodies were different after all, and besides, it was probably a group of men who came up with that advertising campaign. He thought a moment and then said that only shows how stupid women are, how easily manipulated into thinking they need something "special". How do you fight against that kind of thinking? I mostly didn't.
Some time later -- maybe when that Jodie Foster movie about getting gang-raped was released and making a splash; can you imagine a time when the courts agreed that the way a woman dressed excused rape? -- I remember Kyler and I watching something on TV and he made a comment like, "I don't know why women act like getting raped would be the worst thing that could ever happen to them. How could something you do willingly with someone be the worst thing that could happen to you with someone else? It's not like you're being murdered." I do remember that I was a virgin at the time, and that I was disgusted and horrified by the thought of rape (though not actually worried about it happening), and I laid into Kyler and told him that if I was ever raped, the person had better kill me too because I couldn't live with it. That surprised him, and it might have affected his thinking a teeny tiny bit, but then again, maybe not: when he was a university student in the 90s, there was a women's topless protest happening not far from where he lived (the protest being about the right for women to be topless in public) and Kyler and his friends left early to get a good spot at the protest site in order to ogle the boobies. I know Kyler feels that he has been force-fed feminism from his early years, from Helen Reddy on the radio to Gloria from All in the Family on TV, and he sees no irony in acting like the patriarchal chauvinist pig that he insists is a myth; a group delusion that insecure women suffer from. His is a mind I can sort of understand, but not inhabit.
All this is to make a point: I don't remember much of Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan, but I do remember being turned right off by a rape and subsequent back-alley abortion scene; the ways that the woman acted and reacted didn't feel true to me, and when I thought about it, I decided that maybe this isn't territory that a male author should approach. I felt the same way later when I read Stephen King's Gerald's Game -- in which a woman is left handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin after her partner suffers a fatal heart attack during the sex act -- and I rolled my eyes while the woman thought about what sex had been like with Gerald, what chauvinism she had had to suffer at her job. I just kept thinking: this is a woman's interior story and Stephen King isn't getting it right. It occurred to me that I could write a book about a straight man who goes to prison and write about what it is like for him to be raped by another man, and while I can imagine that the loss of power and physical revulsion would have special and specific mental effects after a lifetime of macho expectations, I haven't lived under those expectations, and that is not my story to write. And then I concluded: even the most insightful and empathetic author probably shouldn't write a novel primarily from the opposite gender's point-of-view; they might sort of understand the workings of the opposite gender's mind, but they could never inhabit it. No man who didn't live my life -- complete with my little brother's misinformed misogyny -- could possibly write my story.
And that's why I never read another Richard B. Wright until now, and even though I really did like the passages from October, I can't imagine picking it up. This might be unfair of me, but life is short and while my reading time is generous, it is ultimately finite.
