The Story of the Night was published by Picador in 1996. Richard Garay is half-Irish, half-Argentine — the son of an English-speaking mother who raised him in Buenos Aires after his father’s death. He is gay and entirely closeted. The novel follows him from the Falklands War (1982) through the Menem years of privatization and neoliberal reform in the early 1990s.
Richard becomes involved with an American couple — Susan and Donald Ford — who are facilitating US corporate investment in newly privatized Argentine industries. Through them, he enters a world of diplomatic cocktail parties, business deals, and political manipulation. He also begins a clandestine sexual life — encounters in parks and hotels — while maintaining his performance of heterosexual respectability. When AIDS arrives in Buenos Aires, the two worlds collide.
Toibin uses Argentina’s political context (military dictatorship, the dirty war, economic collapse, Menem’s sell-off) as a parallel to Richard’s personal concealment: the country, like Richard, has been performing a version of itself that cannot be sustained. The novel’s quiet, affectless prose mirrors Richard’s emotional suppression.
Collecting The Story of the Night
First edition (Picador, London, 1996): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$60
- Signed first: $60–$120