‘The Night We Met’ review: Abby Jimenez in the trend zone

The Night We Met is the kind of novel that makes you want to defend a genre to people who’ve already decided not to read it. Which might be the highest compliment available for a book in its category.

A few years ago I started reading contemporary romance in a more sustained way. Partly out of professional curiosity, partly out of some desire to better understand what was clearly resonating with enormous numbers of people I respected. And partly, if I’m honest, because prestige television and film had become somewhat exhaustingly cynical. I needed something that promised to resolve in the right direction.

What I found was that the good stuff in the genre, the Emily Henry and Christina Lauren and Talia Hibbert material, was doing something that more “serious” literary fiction had largely stopped trusting itself to do in the upmarket-celebrity-book-club era. It was taking the inner life of longing seriously.

What Jimenez has been after all along.

Abby Jimenez has been working tirelessly in that same territory for quite some time now. The Night We Met, her eighth novel and the second entry in what she’s calling the Say You’ll Remember Me series, is the one of the better versions of what she’s produced over the last half-decade. And maybe what she’s been after all along.

Here’s the setup. Larissa, a gig-economy worker drowning in debt her absent father left her, chooses a ride home from a concert with the wrong man. The right man was standing right there when it happened. Because he’s the wrong man’s best friend.

More specifically, he’s Mike’s best friend, Chris. Chris is a pharmacist, voracious reader, and the new love-language crown prince of “acts of service.” He’s also quietly in love with Larissa from a distance while she dates someone who keeps asking him to cover for his failures.

An impossible situation. “Because of course it was.”

The novel itself is quite short, but, in typical Jiménez fashion, it economically spans a pretty sizable span of time. It usually knows when to fade to black, jump a little forward, and push past the yada-yada plotting setups that might’ve slowed things down a bit too much.

That said, because the longing within the book hits such a fever pitch early on, even that sprint to the finish line can feel impossibly long. That’s because it’s an impossible situation, and Jimenez truly sells the angst within Chris’s character. Why he can’t just say the thing and get the girl and so on.

Unlike in Say You’ll Remember Me, which serves more as a quasi-prequel and prototype to The Night We Met than a first novel (complete with handful of Xavier/Samantha moments of course), this story actually gets the stakes and quality of yearning almost fully right. Say You’ll Remember Me certainly had its irresistibly swooning moments, but The Night We Met is a far more complete thought. One that does feel built out and developed over a long period of time rather than churned out.

The trope hoodie.

You can really tell that Jimenez struggled with the nuance of this budding relationship and why it couldn’t all just work out as easily as the reader might want it to. Say You’ll Remember Me for its part sort of fizzled out in its final third with a deus ex machina that was admittedly hard to believe and far from satisfying. So it’s nice to see that The Night We Met falls more within the territory of Just for the Summer, which is still Jimenez’s best work in this zone.

See, what makes Jimenez interesting — and here’s where it’s probably helpful to push back against how she tends to get discussed — is that she isn’t fundamentally a writer of tropes. She’s a writer of emotional predicaments that happen to wear the clothing of tropes. Or in this case the hoodie.

The “best friend’s girlfriend” premise sounds like a premise. But Jimenez is doing something more specific with it. She’s writing about what it feels like to love someone correctly while being structurally prohibited from expressing that love.

Chris and Larissa and Larissa and Mike and Mike and Chris.

Chris pines from a distance, but not because he lacks courage, which is the norm for these kinds of stories. No, he’s restraining himself because he has a clear and coherent moral understanding of friendship. His love is, in fact, the most rigorous expression of his character, and the slow burn is the form that moral seriousness takes in narrative.

Another striking detail is how Chris arranges things for Larissa without her knowledge while she credits Mike for them. He suggests gifts, he handles logistics, he makes the car repair possible. And it’s all the more tragic because she goes home thinking her boyfriend is thoughtful.

No, the book doesn’t really wrestle with the borderline toxicity of this deception, though it does gesture at it in a small way. But it’s maybe forgivable in context because it’s nice to see that Chris is actually flawed and makes egregious mistakes. This is something that truly eluded the Xavier/Samantha dynamic, which devolved into the stuff of tumblr-bait by the end.

“The door you know.”

The reader receives this dramatic irony from early in the book and has to hold it through chapter after chapter of Larissa slowly recalibrating what she understands about both men. This is technically the oldest device in the storytelling kit. It is also, in Jimenez’s hands, truly painful in a way that sneaks up on you.

You know the truth. The protagonist doesn’t. You keep wishing she could see what you see. And then you realize that her not seeing it is entirely believable. Because her relationship with familiarity-as-safety — the novel calls it “the door you know,” meaning the door you run toward in a crisis even if it leads somewhere dangerous — explains why even a smart person would keep misreading an obvious situation.

Romance has a structural advantage over literary fiction when it comes to this particular kind of emotional story. Its genre contract guarantees resolution of some kind. Almost always the happily ever after, load-bearing as it is. Yes, this makes it predictable, but that predictability is also why the form exists. So that the author can build tension and suspense over the “how-can-they-possibly-get-together” in a way that literary fiction can’t sustain without collapsing into tragedy or ambiguity.

A billboard romance.

Jimenez clearly knows what she’s doing with that contract. She builds toward the resolution rather than away from it. The slow burn isn’t delay for delay’s sake. It’s the accumulation of evidence that when these two people finally reach each other, they will have earned it in a way that a faster story couldn’t provide.

The best scene in the novel is probably when Chris drives Larissa to billboard locations at 1:00am so she can complete $15 secret-shopping gigs. They exchange phones and look at each other’s playlists. He calls her beautiful for the first time (sheepishly of course) and tries to make it sound like an objective assessment.

She realizes, for the first time, that he was interested in her on the night they met. Before Mike “eclipsed” him. It’s a scene of almost nothing happening. Two people sitting in a car looking at songs instead of each other. And it works because Jimenez has, at that point, spent enough pages inside both of their heads that every small thing lands with the weight of all the pages before it.

The usual pitfalls.

This is what the dual first-person POV is for! To both give the reader information a single-POV couldn’t manage (sorry, Emily Henry) and to make the reader truly feel the distance between two people who already know everything they need to know about each other.

As for the novel’s shortcomings, they’re certainly easy to point out. The big one is the usual pitfall Jimenez runs into. Her books are addicting and fun to blitz through, that much is obvious. But her stories still seem to struggle with their final acts. Like most if not all of her previous books, the ending just isn’t that satisfying compared to everything that happens leading up to it. Just for the Summer got the closest to an airtight conclusion, but The Night We Met still has this glaring “is that that’s it?” staring at its final pages.

To be fair, we’ll almost certainly catch up with these lovable kids in later novels. Even other series have been blending with their Minnesota counterparts pretty consistently since Part of Your World. As someone who pretty famously loves Easter eggs, these books continue to be a delight in catching all the little clues and references and cameos. Especially when they distract from the book’s real pitfalls, like the repeated prose ticks (do people really suck air through their teeth?) and rushed scenes.

The “Acts-Of-Service” King.

And yes, there is plenty more holding The Night We Met back from the pinnacle of the genre. Chris, for all his emotional legibility, occasionally tips from “saintly” into “frictionless.” The bookstore scene, for example, involves a purchase that comes right after an expensive gesture involving furniture and appliances. And the cumulative effect is a man who has no needs or desires that aren’t in Larissa’s service.

That’s a fantasy. And I understand why the genre traffics so hard in it, but Jimenez is usually more careful about giving her love interests their own inner weather. Jacob in Yours Truly had genuine anxiety that complicated his choices. Justin in Just for the Summer had guardianship of three siblings that created real tension.

But Chris’s desire to take care of Larissa is so absolute and so unambivalent that at some point it becomes a description of perfection rather than a portrait of a person. Or even tipping into the territory of toxic obsession. That matters, because the novel is asking us to believe in his moral anguish. And moral anguish requires, at minimum, that the person anguishing has something at stake beyond the object of their love.

Star-crossed stitches.

The heat level, which has migrated toward fade-to-black across her recent work, will also matter to some portion of her readership. I’m not particularly invested in this as a critical issue, but it’s worth noting that the shift changes the pacing of the back third of the book.

Slow burns that end without explicit consummation scenes require an alternative form of release. Usually through emotional confrontation. And Jimenez is generally skilled at this! The quoted passage from the novel-within-the-novel, Cross Stitch, is an elegant example. But “elegant” in a slow burn is a little bit like a joke that’s funny without landing the punchline all the way. You appreciate the craft. You still feel the ghost of an uncrossed finish line.

There’s also the matter of Mike. Mike is, by nearly all accounts, this novel’s most interesting character and the book’s most principled risk. Jimenez has said publicly that she waited years to write this story because she didn’t want anyone to hate anybody. What she produced is a love triangle where the third point is not a villain but a man whose greatest fear — looking foolish in front of people — has produced alcoholism that makes him look foolish in front of people anyway.

Mike will return.

That’s pretty sad stuff. It’s the kind of self-fulfilling shame spiral that serious literary fiction would take at least 300 pages of interiority to establish. Jimenez establishes it through behavior, which is harder and more honest. Mike is a man who asks his best friend to cover his failures with his girlfriend. Not because he’s cruel but because his relationship with his own inadequacy will not allow him to simply show up and fail in front of her and try again.

Mike’s secrets give Chris moral cover to spend a ton of time with Larissa. To get to know her, be there for her, even adopt a dog with her. They also make Mike sympathetic enough that some readers might feel the novel handles his climax with Larissa a little too conveniently. The moral weight of leaving someone with a dependency problem is real, and the novel shrugs toward it without fully sitting inside it.

The fact that Jimenez is already planning to give Mike his own novel is both a narrative act of grace and a smart commercial decision. He is too interesting to be a footnote, and the small tease of the new coworker giving him trouble (and happens to be a “she”) certainly hints at another amusing rom-com from the rom-com magician herself.

Timing is not destiny.

None of which is to say the book doesn’t work. It does. It works in the way that the best genre fiction works. Which is by identifying a real emotional truth — that we sometimes choose the wrong door, that love can be felt most clearly in someone else’s consistent invisible labor, that timing is not destiny but it is a weight that presses on destiny — and finding a story shape that fits it well.

The Night We Met is certainly far from subtle, but Jimenez has never been a subtle writer. And subtle is not the same as good. Jimenez at her best, which this gets close to, is quite great at making you feel something you already know is coming, and make the feeling land anyway.

That’s harder than it looks. And no, The Night We Met isn’t a novel meant to convert the skeptics. It’s a novel for people who have already decided to trust the form. And it rewards that trust almost entirely. It is also, not coincidentally, a novel about what it costs to see someone clearly when the constant realities of your life requires you not to act on what you see. For a certain kind of reader, that will be a story they’re willing to meet on its own terms.

The Night We Met is available now in hardcover, paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats.

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Image courtesy of Hachette Book Group.