Bad Dinner Parties

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” said Mao Zedong. But there are dinner parties that can make you wish you’d gone to a revolution instead. When we’re reading about them rather than experiencing them in real time, however, the mayhem can be quite enjoyable. And after all, what better stage for character revelation than the dinner table with its fixed rules and mandatory interaction, and where escape is almost impossible? Here are two such bad scenes, from recent novels.

The first takes place at a restaurant. This restaurant should actually be considered one of the main characters of Herman Koch’s wildly popular Dutch bestseller, The Dinner. Two brothers and their wives have met to discuss a troubling incident in which their two sons are imbroiled. Paul is the unreliable and (you will soon conclude) unsavory narrator, while his brother Serge is a rising politician who is likely to be the next prime minister. 

And that is the first problem. Why would they choose to discuss such a sensitive topic at a trendy restaurant, where Serge is well-known and other diners drift over to ask if they can be photographed with him? In their place I would have opted for a disused subway tunnel. The answer is because satirizing the place -- where the waiter points out specials with his pinkie extended, the food arrives on enormous plates with vast white spaces, and every ingredient is sourced to an innocent garden plot somewhere -- is part of the performance. Koch is good at this and if you like novels of manners (I do) you’ll enjoy it. Nevertheless, after awhile you may feel the restaurant is just too easy a target and the performance gets old.

For the rest, we have sibling rivalry, and -- well, mostly sibling rivalry. There is some buildup of suspense as we learn just what it is the boys have done, and just what plan of action each of the four parents will propose. It is all fairly slick and well presented, if also fairly horrible (a neurological diagnosis of the evil is unconvincingly suggested). You probably won’t be bored, but you may well be disappointed.

The second novel, Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests, is quite a different affair. Here we are in an English country house in 1912 or so. Downton Abbey territory, but the Abbey this is not. The family are social climbers (just how far they have climbed is not revealed until the end), servants are all too few, and ruin is staring them in the face. The literary influence here is Saki, the elegant and somewhat malicious Edwardian satirist. Just in case we’ve missed it, one of the characters bears the name of Saki’s main character, Clovis. And while Jones cannot quite match Saki’s purring prose, she does a very good job trying.

The host family includes a beautiful, recently remarried widow, and her children: charming, languid son (Clovis), nubile daughter (Emerald, whose birthday dinner this is), and an eccentric, neglected, much younger daughter (Smudge -- yes, really). The guests are another brother and sister, more virtuous, stodgier and with unrequited crushes on Clovis and Emerald. There is also a rich mill owner who is courting Emerald with no success.

Before the family sits down to their dinner (two toiling servants doing the work of twenty), word comes that there has been a “dreadful accident” on a nearby railway line, and they will have to shelter the survivors. Soon a pale, bedraggled crowd of third-class passengers arrive and are shuffled away to an unused morning room. The family seems to forget their existence very easily, unless periodically reminded. One of the passengers, however, is quite different: a raucous, self-confident semi-gentleman who charms Clovis and gets himself invited to dinner.

The succeeding events, orchestrated by this particular uninvited guest, include every kind of disaster, one of the cruellest party games ever described, and finally a large dollop of the supernatural. Needless to say, there is an epic storm outside the house, and no hope of rescue. As in any nightmare, escape is cut off -- even the prosaic mill owner finds that his Rolls-Royce will not start. There is a whole auxiliary cast of perfectly realized animals, some of whom are quite essential to the plot. I especially liked the kitten, Tenterhooks, with her three-inch legs and tiny claws.

Finally, however, dawn arrives. Each of the characters -- even the nasty gentleman -- has learned something and changed for the better. The sky is blue and it is May Day. A deus ex machina appears, and -- but I must say no more. If you like a good plot, I think you’ll be glad you weren’t invited to this particular party, but happy you had a chance to eavesdrop.