Robert J. Illo, an architect and engineer, has spent his career focusing on peoples’ changing housing needs. “Architects are always wrestling with the impact of the built environment on natural communities and the impact that has on communities and families,” Illo says. While he usually works out of his design practice in Central Pennsylvania, he often takes on a secondary role assessing damage after major storms—when the relationship between the natural, the built, and the community is often in chaos. With his debut novel, A Night in October, Illo set out to share his wider assessment of the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy. “Not to write about the damage to the buildings and infrastructure,” he says. “But about the damage that hurricanes do to families.”
Illo has been assessing storm damage since the 1980s, but it wasn’t until seeing Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005 that he felt compelled to write about his experiences. Illo says of his first days in New Orleans in 2005, “I had never been in a place with that level of devastation.” Like the characters in his novel, he saw streets replaced with razor wire barricades and the National Guard patrolling the area. “We take for granted in the United States that we have law and order,” he says. “But when a hurricane comes through, all bets are off.”
Illo began documenting experiences from these sites but never found the right way to bring them all together. It was in 2012, after being called to the site of Hurricane Sandy, in the New York and New Jersey region where he grew up, that it became clear to him that a novel centered on people’s lives would better convey that particular type of disaster than a series of isolated incidents. “I think that people can understand better if they get to know the characters and identify with them,” he says. “They can understand better how a hurricane turns that upside down.”
A Night in October follows the fictional Buono family. Ricky and Sherry, in their 60s, live on one of New York’s barrier islands, and their adult daughter Cammie lives on the Jersey Shore with her own husband and son. Neither family is too concerned with Sandy—which had already been downgraded to “Post Tropical Storm Sandy” by the evening it collided with the area. But their houses fill with water, their power goes out, and they all find themselves trapped in a nightmare of continuously seeking refuge on cots and in overcrowded hotels, struggling to find normalcy.
Using his architect’s eye for detail, Illo gives great form to the storm before, during, and after. The Kirkus review notes that “cold seawater practically drips from the pages” thanks to Illo’s vivid descriptions, like Sherry’s view of her devastated street in the light of day:
The sun had broken through the clouds and it sent harsh shadows onto the salt- sand- and gypsum-coated buildings and pavements turning their neighborhood into a black and white photograph with the details out of focus. The sound of the surf echoed through the empty streets and made a reasonable sound track for the salty veil that shrouded the place where she and Ricky had made their home.
Although Illo provides several similarly stirring descriptions of the landscape, he wanted to dive most deeply into the lives that the storm upended. The book even traces the dynamics of Sherry and Ricky’s marriage back to when they first met in college. (Illo mapped out their biographies on a 40-foot sheet of paper—another example of an architect’s attention to detail.) To him, this seemed the best way to make the disaster more accessible for readers. “With the form of a novel,” Illo explains, “I could weave the hundreds of stories I’ve heard into a plausible thread involving three generations of a family.”
Those hundreds of stories Illo had collected came directly from the homes he inspected after Sandy. He explains that while taking measurements, recording data, and performing calculations, he also spent time with the homeowners, learning a lot about them during their brief encounters. “Many people are eager to tell me what they’ve been through with a storm or just to talk about the things that we have in common,” Illo says.
He was also inspired by those people who didn’t talk to him. In the novel, Ricky and Sherry have adopted their infant granddaughter after their own daughter Jessie left her responsibilities to head west. Illo imagined the family drama behind this situation when he visited an elderly couple in Manahawkin, New Jersey, who had an infant in their home. While inspecting, Illo found a bassinet and stacks of diapers soaked through with seawater. He couldn’t help wondering how the couple came to live with an infant. “But I never asked them, and they never offered,” he says, “So the story of Jessie came out of that.”
Illo says that, despite the difficulty, he wanted to take on the damage-assessment jobs. “It’s something I could give, and it’s something that many families desperately need.” With insurance claims that drag on for years, assessors are intended to be objective, independent voices that bring clarity to families. “But many will vilify the engineers who come out and report to the insurance company,” he admits. That’s why the novel shifts perspectives in its conclusion, introducing readers to the character of Jim Connor, an assessor striving to be fair and helpful, just like Illo, whom the Buonos confront with the long struggle to put their lives back together.
“I thought from the beginning that there would be no villains in this story,” Illo says of his decision to portray multiple perspectives. Illo even anthropomorphizes the storm in the hopes that readers would come to identify with it rather than seeing it as a purely malevolent force. After all, “It only did what it was meant to do,” he says. To that end, Illo opens his book with a depiction of the storm’s creation and long crawl over warm Caribbean waters. He likens it to a child running through a room and, ultimately, as a force striving in vain to find open waters, “as if it could not bear to share all of its raucous energies with the tiny things humans make.”
Having grown up blocks away from the ocean in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey, Illo has always appreciated coastal living. (And he misses it terribly, now surrounded by the woods of Central Pennsylvania.) But he ends A Night in October with questions about how we as people will deal with our built and natural environments over the next half-century. As climate change creates more and more devastating storms, should the hurricane coast be reverted to undeveloped land in order to limit these tragedies?
For Illo, he does not have any easy answers to that question. What is important is to consider families like the Buono’s, who assume their coastal lifestyle and the houses they have bought blocks from the ocean belong to them. But Illo cautions that, in the future, this lifestyle, “may not belong to anybody.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.