[click image, audio, 47 minutes — either I was too tired when I posted this and my eyes weren't working right, or I uploaded a middle version of the image I'd worked on to post instead of the end version... so if the image looks different to you now, well, that's because it is. Yet another thing that chuffs me about the feeds readers! I do so much work making the images go with this page. I'm never going to turn into a bastard Picasso on you, but, pfeh, you'll pardon me, I'm sure, if I continue to question the esthetic of your environment and what it does to your vitality and empathy, or lack thereof. Plus, the only way you will be getting this update and improvement is if you've come late to this post on your reader. I shudder to think of the partially-finished posts you have witnessed, never seeing the links added later and updates. I'm NOT going to sacrifice my spontaneity for posting the perfectly-polished every time. Maybe I will create a drafts blog and do more work before the posts hit this page, so you will get better out there, but STILL, pfeh, yuck. Those readers are UGLY. So I'm going to go right ahead and say the rest I had to say about this story, because you are, most probably, unable to know there's been any change.].
And I remember thinking how glad I was to have finished it, it being past tense, and then thinking how odd it was to have that thought, felt funny. I read short stories in that magazine every week, and rarely remember a one of them, and wouldn't have remembered this one, but for having had that funny, faintly luminous feeling at the very end of it over nothing I could discern at that moment. I thought the whole thing was a man who really adored his wife and wanted somehow to erase her regret and grief, didn't want her to think less of herself, wanted to be protective but not paternal, afraid her bitterness and obsession with unpredictability might yank her out of his life. So listening to these women discussing it, and going through the story again, I still say the gender-based agenda is just ugly, from either side. I mean, from the very start he didn't like her oldest friend precisely because she was
not a good friend to her, competed with her, a boring snob and he was right. That seems to have escaped these two. I won't say more, in case you want to listen and express your own thoughts on the matter, but I feel these two professionals twisted this short story to suit some dim notion of feminism and missed the real depth of the piece.
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Deborah Treisman and Monica Ali read Joshua Ferris’s “The Dinner Party” and discuss it at the image link... sort of like we did in school, expressing what we took away from the works and what we thought the author meant to convey and talking about the characters as though they were real people out there, out there in one of the billions of little worlds that make up the cosmos in which we walk around, pretending usually is just this life, just this little cell in the corner of our own minds and what it has let in as existent.
The protagonist here is just this guy, this unpretentious guy, who clearly just wants his life and friends and love and no pressures to be politically correct or politically astute. There's some famous or high socialite beauty at the party into which he stumbles later in the story, and he has no clue who she is, nor obviously does he particularly care. If you haven't gotten the picture that he's not interested in this sort of thing, but his wife IS, by this time in the story, the ending is going to lead you to prattle about marriages in trouble and postulate that he's a drunk, because he's had too much to drink this night.
He was drinking liberally because he was facing the specter of an evening with his wife's oldest friend and her husband. He does not like the friend because she competes with his wife instead of being her friend. This is extra hard for him because his wife is bitter about being barren and her snob friend is pregnant, and he's NOT looking forward to having this couple over to the impeccably-prepared gourmet dinner his wife is slaving to produce to impress her friend. He's drunkenly making up all this outrageous stuff to help release his wife from the pressure of the competition and the pain of her sense of loss and insufficiency from being unable to have children. He's expressing his solidarity with her, using that mode of tasteless statements he so enjoys about her... going probably overboard because he is increasingly sloshed.
Twice she points out he's no help. Once it is about his inability to make her pregnant, which both know is because she can't conceive. The next time it is about his refusal to enter into the game she calls her friendship, her social life, her desire to be different, superior, unpredictable, chic. Her friend is continually beating her out in these pursuits and it's always a while before she can calm down about it and revert to the friendly feeling again. And, this character flaw of hers keeps him frightened that she will just up and disappear on him one day.
This is revealed, or confirmed, when the protagonist is outside the snob friend's apartment being told off by her. She's a raving bitch, doesn't give a shit about her oldest friend and tries to blame
him for that. He's just him. We are seeing throughout the story a guy who completely loves his wife of many years, whose sense of the marriage has not changed from the realization that they can't have kids, who wants his wife not to be so traumatized by it, so embittered by it, so whipped in the self-esteem department by it, wants to help her with that, show his solidarity with her, and she can't see it, is not comforted, does not connect, because she's been thrown into this role as defective and pitiable in a whole circle full of winners and her husband's complete lack of interest in that circle is no help to her sense of self-worth... because her sense of worthiness is based on superficial crap with superficial people... and he's outright incapable of going there, even for her sake... well because it wouldn't ACTUALLY be for her sake, now would it?
Deborah and Monica go on as though he is an alcoholic schlub who is a weight on his wife. It is clear in this story that he is drinking a lot this evening to be able to endure the visit with his wife's awful friends. It is clear that his wife is pissed off at him for getting so drunk when she's trying to pull off this perfect dinner party, and it's made the worse for her because she knows he's doing it to ward off the difficulty of a difficulty that is a difficulty for her in a different sense. It is also clear that the husband of his wife's friend is the alcoholic. Basically, his wife's friendship of so many years is at least equal parts competition and affection for her, while probably completely competition for the bitch who is late to her exquisite dinner. Our protagonist's wife would not have married a loser. She would have married someone her snob friends would be impressed by. So even though we never hear what he does, or who he is in the world, it's pretty obvious he's someone who's made a name for himself in art or letters or something snobs revere. The disappointment is that he isn't playing their game. Doesn't give a shit what celebrities they know, doesn't even follow who's a celebrity, and is abashed by his friend's apparent interest in this stuff.
These two seem to think that the couple times late in the story where he loses his focus, his sense of the here and now, mean he really is a drunk schlub, but it's the opposite. He's drunk that night and the difficulty with focus, the short trips into disorientation, are meant to show he isn't any good at drinking or at the society page. If this were about his alcoholism, he would have grabbed a drink at the bitch's apartment first thing instead of thinking later that it would have made him fit in better if he had grabbed a drink first thing, and he'd have resumed drinking when he got back home, or passed out, definitely not kept trying to deal with his wife's pain and anger and bitterness.
Deborah and Monica think
he's the one who's bitter! OMG!
Sheesh. What planet are these people on?
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Maybe they know perfectly well this is what the story is saying, but can't discuss it because dissing high society, in certain circles, in New York is simply
not done. The actuality of this story being printed by
The New Yorker is in fact far hipper than the celebrities whose attention ups one's social standing.
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She's lonely in her marriage to him because she can't get him devolve back into that age-old keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing, that life of posturing compensating for meaning.
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Maybe you would prefer to read it...?
And another. No doubt about it, the guy's a good writer.
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