Recent Reading: The Night Gift by Patricia McKillip

So, The Night Gift, published in 1976 — absolutely amazing how long ago that was — is one of McKillip’s very early works, before she really decided what she wanted to write, evidently. I mean, she’d written The House on Parchment Street, The Throme of the Erril of Sherril, and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Then this one. They are each quite different from the others. House is a charming MG ghost story. The ghost is not nearly as important as the family relationships. The Night Gift is like that, minus the ghost story.

In fact, The Night Gift reminds me fairly strongly of The Egypt Game by Zelpha Keatley Snyder. In that story, kids break into an unused yard and create props and rituals related to Egypt. Two girls begin the game and then other kids gradually join in. The kids are unaware of the deep isolation of the man whose yard they’ve turned into Egypt. Then there is some excitement, which serves to pull this man back into the community.

In The Night Gift, kids break into an abandoned house in order to create, in one room, a beautiful place. They are specifically doing this for a brother who tried to commit suicide, as a gift for when he returns from an institution. Three girls, including the sister, begin this project and then other kids are gradually pulled in.

I think this story must have been challenging to write. I mean, how would you handle the ending if you were writing this story? Isn’t that something of a poser?

A straight-up happy ending — “Oh, you’ve made this beautiful place for me, now I feel better!” — would be impossible. That kind of ending would utterly trivialize clinical depression. It would be telling a false story about how people are, what depression is, about everything.

Yet a straight-up tragic ending — “I can’t perceive beauty, I can’t perceive that you care about me, I’m unmoved, I’m going to commit suicide anyway” — would be a heck of a downer. Worse, if the brother actually goes all the way to suicide at the end, then the theme of the story immediately becomes this theme: Your efforts to make the world a better place are ineffectual. Your struggle to help someone is pointless.” This would be a horrible theme. It would also be telling a false story, because sure, lots of efforts to make something better don’t work, or don’t work as well as you’d hoped, or nothing can make some terrible thing better. But the effort to think about someone who is suffering and work to make that person’s life better is basically always worthwhile, so any theme that says don’t bother, it’s hopeless is both terrible and false.

McKillip threaded this needle with an ambiguous ending, and I think the way she did it works.

This is a story about kids, about families, and about growing up. It’s not a coming-of-age story. The children don’t come of age. They’re moving toward adulthood, but they’re not there yet. That’s one reason it’s a MG story. Therefore, this story is a good example about how a story can be about growing up, but not a coming-of-age story.

It’s well written, as you’d expect. It’s a thoroughly positive story despite the ambiguous ending. That’s because everyone is trying to do good things and mostly succeeding. A brother is nice to his sister and her friends. A younger sister is nice to an older sister who is struggling. Friends are nice to each other. A girl realizes the guy she has a crush on is focused on her friend, not on her, and doesn’t blame anybody for this and copes and it’s not fun for her, but it’s the exact opposite of angsty self-indulgence. Parents try to do the right things for their kids, and mostly succeed.

There’s no trace of the poetic tone McKillip captured in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld — which is a wonderful story — or in The Throme, which I think is much less successful. It’s dreamlike, but there’s not a lot to it, or that’s how I remember it. (I haven’t read it for a good long time.) The Night Gift is targeted for quite young readers, ten or twelve years old, rather than hovering at the upper end of YA, which is where I’d say more of her novels fall.

But I liked it quite a bit, and it was a good choice for a day when the power was out and I wanted something quick and easy to read