In Joshua Ferris’ compelling new book of short stories, “The Dinner Party,” people constantly sabotage their own happiness by focusing on what was, what might have been, what could be. The book could have been titled “Regrets.”
In one story, “The Breeze,” a woman becomes intoxicated by a lovely spring breeze blowing through Brooklyn. She dreams up the perfect day — picnicking in Central Park with her husband, tossing a Frisbee on the grass, having sex in a wooded glade, grabbing drinks with friends on an outdoor patio late into the night. But these plans become a sort of tyranny as they fail to come to be. Her husband would rather see a movie. Her excitement curdles into existential disappointment with the day, her marriage, her life:
This was her one and only life! It would require something of her to be equal to this day, she had thought at that moment in the brig, and now, looking at herself in the mirror in the ladies’ room, scrutinizing her eyes, her veined and clouded eyes, she was afraid that she had made a series of poor choices and failed.
In the story that opens the book and gives it its title, “The Dinner Party,” a husband and wife bicker about another couple as they prepare to host them for dinner. The husband dislikes the couple. They are too predictable and lame: “I can tell you everything that will happen from the moment they arrive to the little kiss on the cheek goodbye and I just can’t (expletive) do it.” He wants to be with people as fascinating as he imagines he and wife are. The couple never shows up. Chaos ensues.
Before he became a writer, Ferris worked at an advertising agency in Chicago, which became the setting for his first novel, “Then We Came To The End.” It’s easy to see the influence of that career in “The Dinner Party,” which is filled with gauzy marketing images — socializing with friends amid the glittering New York City skyline, drinking wine while preparing a meal for a dinner party. These idealized images haunt the characters that populate “The Dinner Party,” making them yearn for something more, something better.
In “A Fair Price,” a man named Jack hires a guy to help him move boxes and furniture out of a storage space. Jack has, it is clear, a decent life. He lives with his fiancee, Lisa, in what sounds like a hipster dream home — a restored farmhouse with “a lovely porch, a tree swing, a cherrywood canoe beside the artificial pond” at the end of a “private drive where the blacktop gave way to dirt.”
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And yet, Jack throws it all away because the moving man, Mike, refuses to play along with his fantasy — that the two men become such good buddies as they move boxes that Jack invites Mike, whom he imagines has a nickname, “Griff,” to his wedding. “There was nothing like a day of manual labor to forge a bond between two guys.” Jack even fantasizes about a scene between him and Mike at the wedding that reads like ad copy:
“Hey, and by the way. Thanks for inviting me. I’m real honored.” Lisa would have to pull him away. “I do love how easily you make new friends,” she’d say. He’d circle back before the night was through and part with Griff with a hug. Griff, turning to his date afterwards, saying, “Love that guy.”
And yet, despite the absurdity of this fantasy, Jack becomes more and more agitated by the difference between how the day proceeds and how he wants it to go.
Driven by the gap between reality and their fantasies, Ferris’ characters ask themselves whether this is all there is to life. Jack asks, “What are we here for?” as he realizes Mike isn’t going to become a new BFF. The woman who wants her day in NYC to be Instagram-ready asks herself, “Night after night, she was anxious not to miss out on … what? She didn’t know.”
Ferris’ writing is dark, funny and cold. He does not display warmth or sympathy for his characters. And while he repeatedly illustrates the danger in sacrificing the present for fantasy, Ferris is not trying to diagnose a social ill or moralize. Finishing the book, a reader won’t come away with newfound energy to enjoy life as it is. Instead, Ferris seems to be saying, this is how people are, and this is how they always will be. We sabotage our happiness, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.
Trine Tsouderos is a freelancer.
‘The Dinner Party’
By Joshua Ferris, Little, Brown, 256 pages, $26
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