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| rule 1: don't wear a football jersey to a dinner party |
Today’s entry appears on the Guardian Books Blog, and looks at the worst dinner parties in fiction, the ones you really wouldn’t want to have attended. AND, special bonus for Clothes in Books readers, we have added some useful sartorial rules - each one related to one of the featured books (the one above is easy to match up).
After a look at the Galbraith/Rowling mystery story The Silkworm (on the blog last week), the piece goes on like this:
More books mentioned in the piece are on the blog: Silver Linings Playbook; Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; Edward St Aubyn’s Some Hope; Muriel Spark’s Symposium.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wonderful recent Americanah, there are two matching dinner parties, one in New York one in London, with uncomfortable talk, clashing cultures, and an open and not particularly friendly discussion about race. But in a key phrase we are told that one hostess doesn't mind because "unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things". Is that why we love reading about them, too? – there are plenty of almost heroically bad dinner parties simmering in books.
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| Rule 2: don't wear those trousers that look like a dress |
Helen Fielding stitched up the Smug Marrieds bullying the Singleton in Bridget Jones's Diary back in 1996, Bridget feeling like Miss Havisham and longing to say "I'm not married because … underneath my clothes, my entire body is covered in scales". Bridget can also manage to give a dreadful dinner party – blue soup – a tradition that continues with the American writers Sloane Crosley ("Trevor wants to have a threesome with someone at the table and you are the only single girl there") and Rebecca Harrington (one guest "pulls out a huge bag of chips and starts eating them in front of me".)
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| Rule 3: Even if they ruin your dress, don't make them grovel |
Elaine Dundy's 1958 The Dud Avocado, about a young American woman living the Bohemian life in Paris, contains a terrific description of the guests having to work hard for their simple meal – "all four of us ceaselessly moiling and toiling from kitchen and studio and back again" to transport all the food. Then there's poor Becky Sharp at the beginning of Thackeray's Vanity Fair: flirting a little at dinner, she says everything from India must be good. She takes a mouthful of an unknown dish called curry, and then Joseph Sedley says "Try a chili with it Miss Sharp". So naturally she thinks that will be cooling. "She would have liked to choke old Sedley, but she swallowed her mortification as well as she had the abominable curry before it."
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| Rule 4: Don't wear flapping green velvet sleeves |
More books mentioned in the piece are on the blog: Silver Linings Playbook; Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; Edward St Aubyn’s Some Hope; Muriel Spark’s Symposium.
Moira - I love this piece! Dinner parties are such terrific contexts for all sorts of plot complications, suspense and so on. All that interaction and all of those hidden agendas! And what a rich resource for fine clothes, too!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Margot, and I'm looking forward to a 'Confessions...' post on murder-filled dinner parties....
DeleteNice piece at the Guardian. I have High Fidelity (and have seen the movie). I will have to read the book now.
ReplyDeleteDinner parties sound horrible to me, but then I am anti-social. In a previous life, when I was very, very young I had a pair of palazzo pants like that, not bright red.
I like the book very much, I find it hilarious, but maybe because I knew people like the characters. Did you ever see the film, with John Cusack? They changed a lot - giving it an American setting for example - but I liked that too. I don't think I ever did palazzo pants, and recently I threw out a pair of moderately wide trousers because I thought I was going to trip myself up in them....
DeleteYes, I did see the film with John Cusack. I did not even think about them changing the setting. I like John Cusack a lot. Favorites are Grosse Pointe Blank and Ice Harvest.
ReplyDeleteMy palazzo pants were part of a jumpsuit I think and I only wore it casually around the house, but I remember it vividly.
Yes I really like John Cusack, though not familiar with Ice Harvest, I will look it up.
DeleteClothes live on in our minds...
Can I give real life examples - with extended family and the odd wedding? Perhaps, I'd better not.
ReplyDeleteObviously time for you to write your own novel, Col.
DeleteDinner parties, especially with family, can be murder ... love the photo of the blue dress.
ReplyDeleteYes - I really didn't cover murder story dinner parties here, that needs an entry of its own.
DeleteYour Sparkling Cyanide entry goes well with this too! Really enjoyed reading your piece. I can think of a number of uneasy dinners in both The Provincial Lady and in the Mapp & Lucia books, but am too filled with Sunday sloth to go and look them up properly.
ReplyDeleteThanks Vicki - I think you could write many articles on this topic without running out of bad mealtimes. I like your suggestions - all books that I love too.
DeleteThere's a cringeworthy dinner party in Trollope's "The Prime Minister," a little exercise in social climbing by the scoundrel Felix Lopez who cannot afford a proper household with cook and butler and footmen and wine cellar but nevertheless wants to impress his guests. So he hires caterers, and probably not London's best either: "I cannot say that the dinner was good. It may be a doubt whether such tradesmen as Messrs. Stewam and Sugarscraps do ever produce good food;—or whether, with all the will in the world to do so, such a result is within their power. It is certain, I think, that the humblest mutton chop is better eating than any 'Supreme of chicken after martial manner,'—as I have seen the dish named in a French bill of fare, translated by a French pastrycook for the benefit of his English customers,—when sent in from Messrs. Stewam and Sugarscraps even with their best exertions. Nor can it be said that the wine was good, though Mr. Sugarscraps, when he contracted for the whole entertainment, was eager in his assurance that he procured the very best that London could produce. But the outside look of things was handsome, and there were many dishes, and enough of servants to hand them, and the wines, if not good, were various. Probably Pountney and Gunner did not know good wines. Roby did, but was contented on this occasion to drink them bad. And everything went pleasantly, with perhaps a little too much noise;—everything except the hostess, who was allowed by general consent to be sad and silent[.]" The Lopezes' marriage is already on the rocks and her husband's ambitions, doomed. --Commenter Trollopian, for once earning my moniker
ReplyDeleteAnd here's the un-dinner party. As the above passage suggests, Trollope preferred plain, good, manly food. From Last Chronicle of Barset: "A day or two after the interview which was described in the last chapter John Eames dined with his uncle Mr. Thomas Toogood, in Tavistock Square. He was in the habit of doing this about once a month, and was a great favourite both with his cousins and with their mother. Mr. Toogood did not give dinner-parties; always begging those whom he asked to enjoy his hospitality, to take pot luck, and telling young men whom he could treat with familiarity,—such as his nephew,—that if they wanted to be regaled à la Russe they must not come to number 75, Tavistock Square. 'A leg of mutton and trimmings; that will be about the outside of it,' he would say; but he would add in a whisper,—'and a glass of port such as you don't get every day of your life.' Polly and Lucy Toogood were pretty girls, and merry withal, and certain young men were well contented to accept the attorney's invitations,—whether attracted by the promised leg of mutton, or the port wine, or the young ladies, I will not attempt to say." Nothing à la Russe about this, nothing even French unless you want to call it dining "en famille" as the rather foppish Mr. Wise would in Benson's immortal Mapp & Lucia novels. --Trollopian
ReplyDeleteOh what excellent descriptions! He does such good details, nothing is beneath his notice. And as you say, you'd be sure this showed his own tastes too. I love the name Stewam & Sugarscraps.
DeleteDinner parties in books offers so many further possibilities - you would never run out...
I gave up giving dinner parties about 20 years ago after I invited two of my husband's colleagues and realised from the off that it was a mistake. They did not get on... After that, I decided that, yes, I would cook for one or two friends occasionally, but dinner parties, no. And I have never regretted that decision. I get the feeling that I am not the only one ... Chrissie
ReplyDeleteYes - I honestly think a collective madness came over some of us 20-30 years ago! I like cooking, but I used to do elaborate 3- course meals involving a lot of work, like a restaurant meal. It now seems obvious that if I must have dinners, I should've been doing a super-simple starter, bought-in dessert, intersesting main with one or at most two simple sides. And this would all be for people I wasn't even sure wanted to spend time together, as you say.
DeleteAnd - I remember going to kindly others' houses, who thought we would get on with their other friends, and knowing from about 20 seconds in it wasn't going to happen, but would try to be polite for the next three hours.
My husband once got into a huge argument about local politics at someone's dinnertable. I suggested afterwards that he shouldn't have, and he said 'I know, and I thought that as we were getting going - but then I thought, Oh Moira obviously doesn't like them much, already took agaist them, so it's OK'. The rewards and dangers of a long marriage!
Yes, that's absolutely it - restaurant quality meals! Why not just go to a restaurant? Love the story about your husband! Well, at least you didn't have to invite them back ...
ReplyDeleteNigella is a bit wonky on some things, but one of the many reasons I like her is that she has extremely sensible ideas about entertaining and keeping it simple.
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