Pull up a chair for tasty gulps of Joshua Ferris’ ‘The Dinner Party’
In the literary world of Joshua Ferris, dinner parties have zero guests, staying late at the office leads to ruining your whole life, and meeting up with your inlaws might coincide with running into your mistress. Ferris’ first story collection,
The Dinner Party (Little, Brown, 246 pp., out of four), is made up of stories of male dread and male disaster, of rejection and breakups and infidelity, all taking place in a world in which every event has an edge of sinister improbability.
The collection begins with the title story, a wise and sad and achingly funny tale about a husband and wife who think they will be hosting friends for dinner, until surprises take the evening in new directions. Ferris captures the loathing that couples can have for one another even as they act friendly; while his wife prepares the meal, the husband pours himself a drink and lives through the dreaded evening in advance: “Everyone talks in a big hurry, as if we didn’t have four long hours ahead of us. We self-medicate with alcohol. A lot of things are discussed, different issues. Everyone laughs a lot, but later no one can say what exactly was so witty.”
The tales that immediately follow — “The Valetudinarian,” about an old man retiring to Florida shortly after his wife’s death, and “The Pilot,” about a cripplingly selfaware writer wandering a Hollywood party — share similar blends of inventive premises and sharp observations. Even if later stories aren’t quite as inspired, they are never dull; as the collection draws on, though, Ferris’ themes, so powerful when encountered in the individual stories, begin to overlap and repeat.
There are a lot of jilted young men in here, awash in their own pain and not particularly interested in what their own roles might have been in the dissolution of their relationships. When reading them in one volume, a reader might hunger for the tales to be as wide-ranging in their empathies as they are in their story lines.
Then again, why shake things up when these stories are so good at capturing this particular sort of funny, panicked and melancholy man? A finalist for the National Book Award for his debut novel ( Then We Came to the
End), Ferris is an incisive observer, and his descriptions of even the most quotidian situations are elegant and fresh. The air conditioner in a restaurant “had the most delicate day of the year in a chokehold, waiting for its legs to stop kicking,” and a man recently woken up “tries to work down sleep’s cowlick like a cat.” Of course, their very intelligence and sensitivity are what most hounds Ferris’ poor beleaguered men, whose overthinking causes them to fall behind, time and again, the people in their lives who are blithe and unaware.