Guardian Books Blog: Toxic Dinner Parties in Fiction

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: 

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.

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".)

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."

READ MORE AT THE GUARDIAN BOOKS BLOG HERE

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.