Of Dinner Parties and celebrated novels
The Guardian lists memorable awful dinner parties in fiction and somehow misses out The Charioteer's example. Now as opposed to several friends of mine, I'm not that enamored with The Charioteer, but the party at Alec's and Sandy's is hands down one of Mary Renault's most memorable, best written set pieces and any such list that leaves it out is just not complete.
(BTW, switching mediums, Alias the tv show has not one but two great examples of dinner parties with lots of of squirming which are awful to attend but ever so entertaining to watch, and Arvin Sloane is the host in both cases, once in s1 and once in s4. The s4 party wins for me by a small margin because Emily in s1 has no idea what everyone else is up to but Nadia in s4 catches Sydney in the act and thus her final toast is designed to be extra-squirmy.)
(Of course, while we're talking tv, practically any family dinner among the Julian-Claudians in I, Claudius is both awful to attend to for the guests and entertaining to watch/read about, with Caligula's parties winning in sheer ghastliness and host sadism because Caligula.)
Meanwhile, I've finished Donna Tartt's The Gold Finch. Now I actually didn't like The Secret History and never even started The Little Friend, but novel No.3 managed to capture me. I've seen critics call it "Dickensian" and it's easy to see why, very self consciously so on the part of the author - at one point, a character even gets compared to the Artful Dodger in dialogue -, but actually the author it brought to mind to me, especially in the later sections, was Graham Greene even more than The Inimitable. Or maybe "Dickens meets Greene" puts it best. The novel's narrator (who might as well say, like David Copperfield, that whether he's also the hero of his life or whether another gets that title is up to the reader), Theo, loses his mother at age 13 in a ghastly bomb attack on a museum; Tartt captures the numbness, disorientation and depression of grief - which never does go away for Theo - perfectly and still manages to make the tale lively by semi-orphan Theo ending up with a series of caretakers (or not so care-takers) who are each entertaining set pieces: the rich and distant Barbours (who come complete with medication and overeager psychiatrists), Theo's no-good, bad tempered and eternally in debt father Larry and Larry's coke-dealing Las Vegas girl Xandra, nice and kind antique dealer Hobie (other than Theo's dead mother the only parent figure in this novel who does a good job of the parenting).
When whisked from New York to Las Vegas by his father, Theo also meets the character who struck me as a Graham G. import in this modern day Dickensian world, despite the fact he's the one who later gets compared to The Artful Dodger: Boris ("why is it always Boris with you people?", I can hear a certain character in The Wire ask), a mixture of Ukrainian, Polish and Russian boy whose father is in theory a mining expert (in practice something gangsterish, and Boris' professional future is decidedly of the illegal type as well). Boris is the type of charismatic, fast talking, moodswinging operator involved in myriads of shady dealings, whom several narrating Greene characters tend to get swept away with despite being aware they really shouldn't; the friendship between Theo and Boris, starting out as two intelligent, dysfunctional and neglected boys bonding, is arguably after the loss of his mother the most intense relationship of the book. Donna Tartt doesn't shy away from the homoerotic dimension, either; there is some adolescent fumbling, also some panic because of that on Theo's part who thinks he should maybe make it clear to Boris that that he's not interested THAT way, which he never gets around to because Boris aquires a girl friend and Theo is wildly, incredibly jealous (and aware of the irony). There's also a kiss which makes it clear to Theo he loves Boris, but it doesn't get further than that in terms of physical contact. Incidentally, Boris nicknames Theo "Potter" because of Theo's glasses and general resemblance to Harry P., which he keeps up throughout the novel, which caused the irreverent thought in me that if this novel hadn't been written by Critically Acclaimed (tm) Donna Tartt, surely someone would already have voiced the suspicion it started life as a No Magic AU piece of slash fiction. Larry and Xandra aren't Vernon and Petunia Dursley exactly, but the roles they play are similar, and Theo certainly with all his tragic losses has Harry's luck of getting out of dire situations alive despite the odds. At any rate, Tartt has read the Harry Potter novels, not just seen the movies or absorbed something via general pop culture osmosis; at one point Theo compares the sound of what he hears to Parseltongue.
Theo's also fixated on Pippa, a red-haired girl he spotted in the museum shortly before his mother died and who rarely shows up in person in the novel; she's a symbol more than anything, and for a while I was uncertain whether or not Donna Tartt wanted me to see a relationship there instead of Theo having an obsesssion with someone he hardly knows, but as it turns out, no. Mind you, grown-up Theo's other attempted relationships with women aren't coming across as romantic, either, but again, they're not supposed to. I'm not sure what they contribute to the narrative, though, other than Theo trying to be normal on a Watsonian level and the author telling the reader he sees himself as straight on a Doylist one. It's noticable that the three female characters who come across as memorable are the ones Theo isn't involved with romantically but who are in a maternal position to him (or refusing to be) - his mother, Xandra, and Mrs. Barbour. Whereas the girls lack the vividness with which Tartt writes her male characters (of any age).
The Gold Finch of the title is a Dutch painting by a student of Rembrandts - a painting which does exist, btw, -, and which Theo ends up with in the confusion of the museum bombing, after which it becomes both a symbol of beauty and guilt in his life (the more time passes and the older he gets, the less likely it is he can pass taking it off as anything but theft). It's a red thread throughout the novel, and another Greene type of plot device, especially in the way it ends up being used. Though Donna Tartt, as it turns out, is more of an optimist than Greene (and doesn't, as Orwell memorably quipped of Graham Greene, think of hell as a Catholics Only night club). I ended the novel satisfied with everyone's fates. It's not the type of book that calls to me for an immediate rereading, or that I would call a "must", but it certainly held my attention through more than a thousand pages, and never let it flagg.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1000205.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
(BTW, switching mediums, Alias the tv show has not one but two great examples of dinner parties with lots of of squirming which are awful to attend but ever so entertaining to watch, and Arvin Sloane is the host in both cases, once in s1 and once in s4. The s4 party wins for me by a small margin because Emily in s1 has no idea what everyone else is up to but Nadia in s4 catches Sydney in the act and thus her final toast is designed to be extra-squirmy.)
(Of course, while we're talking tv, practically any family dinner among the Julian-Claudians in I, Claudius is both awful to attend to for the guests and entertaining to watch/read about, with Caligula's parties winning in sheer ghastliness and host sadism because Caligula.)
Meanwhile, I've finished Donna Tartt's The Gold Finch. Now I actually didn't like The Secret History and never even started The Little Friend, but novel No.3 managed to capture me. I've seen critics call it "Dickensian" and it's easy to see why, very self consciously so on the part of the author - at one point, a character even gets compared to the Artful Dodger in dialogue -, but actually the author it brought to mind to me, especially in the later sections, was Graham Greene even more than The Inimitable. Or maybe "Dickens meets Greene" puts it best. The novel's narrator (who might as well say, like David Copperfield, that whether he's also the hero of his life or whether another gets that title is up to the reader), Theo, loses his mother at age 13 in a ghastly bomb attack on a museum; Tartt captures the numbness, disorientation and depression of grief - which never does go away for Theo - perfectly and still manages to make the tale lively by semi-orphan Theo ending up with a series of caretakers (or not so care-takers) who are each entertaining set pieces: the rich and distant Barbours (who come complete with medication and overeager psychiatrists), Theo's no-good, bad tempered and eternally in debt father Larry and Larry's coke-dealing Las Vegas girl Xandra, nice and kind antique dealer Hobie (other than Theo's dead mother the only parent figure in this novel who does a good job of the parenting).
When whisked from New York to Las Vegas by his father, Theo also meets the character who struck me as a Graham G. import in this modern day Dickensian world, despite the fact he's the one who later gets compared to The Artful Dodger: Boris ("why is it always Boris with you people?", I can hear a certain character in The Wire ask), a mixture of Ukrainian, Polish and Russian boy whose father is in theory a mining expert (in practice something gangsterish, and Boris' professional future is decidedly of the illegal type as well). Boris is the type of charismatic, fast talking, moodswinging operator involved in myriads of shady dealings, whom several narrating Greene characters tend to get swept away with despite being aware they really shouldn't; the friendship between Theo and Boris, starting out as two intelligent, dysfunctional and neglected boys bonding, is arguably after the loss of his mother the most intense relationship of the book. Donna Tartt doesn't shy away from the homoerotic dimension, either; there is some adolescent fumbling, also some panic because of that on Theo's part who thinks he should maybe make it clear to Boris that that he's not interested THAT way, which he never gets around to because Boris aquires a girl friend and Theo is wildly, incredibly jealous (and aware of the irony). There's also a kiss which makes it clear to Theo he loves Boris, but it doesn't get further than that in terms of physical contact. Incidentally, Boris nicknames Theo "Potter" because of Theo's glasses and general resemblance to Harry P., which he keeps up throughout the novel, which caused the irreverent thought in me that if this novel hadn't been written by Critically Acclaimed (tm) Donna Tartt, surely someone would already have voiced the suspicion it started life as a No Magic AU piece of slash fiction. Larry and Xandra aren't Vernon and Petunia Dursley exactly, but the roles they play are similar, and Theo certainly with all his tragic losses has Harry's luck of getting out of dire situations alive despite the odds. At any rate, Tartt has read the Harry Potter novels, not just seen the movies or absorbed something via general pop culture osmosis; at one point Theo compares the sound of what he hears to Parseltongue.
Theo's also fixated on Pippa, a red-haired girl he spotted in the museum shortly before his mother died and who rarely shows up in person in the novel; she's a symbol more than anything, and for a while I was uncertain whether or not Donna Tartt wanted me to see a relationship there instead of Theo having an obsesssion with someone he hardly knows, but as it turns out, no. Mind you, grown-up Theo's other attempted relationships with women aren't coming across as romantic, either, but again, they're not supposed to. I'm not sure what they contribute to the narrative, though, other than Theo trying to be normal on a Watsonian level and the author telling the reader he sees himself as straight on a Doylist one. It's noticable that the three female characters who come across as memorable are the ones Theo isn't involved with romantically but who are in a maternal position to him (or refusing to be) - his mother, Xandra, and Mrs. Barbour. Whereas the girls lack the vividness with which Tartt writes her male characters (of any age).
The Gold Finch of the title is a Dutch painting by a student of Rembrandts - a painting which does exist, btw, -, and which Theo ends up with in the confusion of the museum bombing, after which it becomes both a symbol of beauty and guilt in his life (the more time passes and the older he gets, the less likely it is he can pass taking it off as anything but theft). It's a red thread throughout the novel, and another Greene type of plot device, especially in the way it ends up being used. Though Donna Tartt, as it turns out, is more of an optimist than Greene (and doesn't, as Orwell memorably quipped of Graham Greene, think of hell as a Catholics Only night club). I ended the novel satisfied with everyone's fates. It's not the type of book that calls to me for an immediate rereading, or that I would call a "must", but it certainly held my attention through more than a thousand pages, and never let it flagg.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1000205.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.