The Dinner Party and Other Stories
by Joshua FerrisLittle, Brown, 2017Half the items in the new collection by Joshua Ferris, The Dinner Party and Other Stories, originally appeared in The New Yorker, but all of the items could easily have seen first light in that magazine's pages; every one of these eleven short stories is just about as distilled a “New Yorker story” as you can get: a quick burst of pages in which not very much happens to not very likable people in not very relatable ways. A moment of disillusionment in the club car. A black boyfriend in Scarsdale. Schadenfreude over the cocktails tray. The template of the typical New Yorker story places such low weight on stage business that all the emphasis is shifted to other things – atmosphere, dialogue, tempo and the like. The template is a gauntlet, a dare to three generations of young writers, to see if they can create compelling drama inside the cramped dimensions of a killing jar.It helps to make New York City the setting, since the city lends itself to trivial drama that's also irresistible. This is the route that most New Yorker short story writers have taken, and it serves Ferris extremely well in most of these stories; even the ones set elsewhere ring and rattle with a purely New York vibe. “More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?),” for example, opens with an aria that speaks of “midwestern sunlight” but breathes of midtown Manhattan:
They're leaving. An exodus. Out of elevators, onto the street. Into the waning midwestern sunlight. Taking their first real breaths of the day. Thank God to be done with that. Lighting up cigarettes, loosening ties. Clustering at corners to await the light change. Joe Pope's window on sixty-two looks down on only a small tight angle of this manic outrush. The women returned to tennis shoes. The men without wives stopping in Burger Kings or Popeye's Fried Chicken for dubious meals laid out on laps during the express ride home. If they don't leave on the 6:12, they're stuck riding the milk train, making all the stops along the route – can't do that. Their evening hours are time-sensitive material made personal: they shimmy and jaywalk, juke and dart toward their destinations in a pathological state of hurry-up-and-go-home.
(The story itself is about a man who wanders around an office building after hours and thinks a lot about leaving somebody a voice message. Then he gets back to work.)Likewise a moment in “The Step Child” when the main character encounters a rackety apartment building elevator:
The elevator, an old cat hibernating on some upper floor, rattled to life when he called it and roared down to him. The doors opened, and he stepped forward with his head down … and a second later stepped back with his head up, as a family of four charged out – the father first, with the stride of a band leader, then an excitable by in a Viking hat blasting enemies with his caulk gun, then a German shepherd, then an older brother wearing athletic knee-highs and a soccer jersey as long as a gown, followed at last by Mom, stuck, with her rumpled flannel shirt and sweatpants, in the wrong family in the wrong season, crying out for Bill to be careful with the tomatoes.
(The story itself is about a man who almost rethinks his life when his wife is gone longer than normal out getting bagels. Then they sit down to dinner.)Joshua Ferris began his career with one overpraised droll novel, Then We Came to the End, and continued it with two underpraised fantastic novels, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The Dinner Party and Other Stories isn't going to toughen the calculus of that balance at either end; it's the kind of solidly enjoyable, consistently readable, occasionally virtuoso short story collection that almost feels compulsory for the Young American Established Literary Figure. It's attractively produced by the good folks at Little, Brown (the American edition sports a genuinely eye-catching cover design by Gregg Kulick), and it serves nicely the dual purpose of collecting stories not all Joshua Ferris fans may have seen and presenting those stories to readers who may want to become Joshua Ferris fans. Its strongest stories, “The Valetudinarian” and “The Breeze” (plus a nicely done Prague turn in “Life in the Heart of the Dead”), are not so much stronger than the rest as to give the whole thing a lopsided feeling, and there are no actual weak spots – a notable achievement in itself, considering that this is a short story collection by a natural-born novelist.
