Even at the loudest parties—say one of Gatsby’s, with the grotesque and glittering abundance, the “salads of harlequin designs” and “floating rounds of cocktails”—it’s often the private conversations and murmured asides that move a story along. Equally thrilling are dinner parties of an entirely different scale: a tense group of couples at a modest table, or the family holiday during which the lacquer of politeness cracks and the truth seeps out. Among my favorite things about reading fiction is how many parties I can attend without having to leave my house.
In my debut novel, The Other Wife, one of the ways I came to understand the characters was to place them in social situations in which they were supposed to have fun. The desire to be seen as a “really fun person” drives many of the narrator’s decisions. As I wrote about her time in college, I noticed how often the appearance of joy, especially at parties, demanded her effort and calculation. I started to wonder more about the way party scenes work on the page. Parties, I realized, demand two distinct registers—a broad sense of the event and a narrow focus on the interpersonal—and offer writers a great opportunity to create a mess.
As a reader, I’m not especially interested in the parties that go as planned. In the books listed below, each writer uses a party’s celebratory chaos as a backdrop for something important, whether dramatic conflict or quiet realization, to brilliant effect. The party is a tool that puts characters under pressure—to impress as hosts, to perform as happy celebrants. In the hands of these skilled authors, parties build to become spectacular displays of literary talent and social insight.
Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian
Haroutunian’s collection of linked stories focuses on friends Taline and Valerie (“Tal and Val”) as they navigate college and the years that follow. In “Twenty-One,” the opening story, an egg strikes Val in the temple as she and Val make their way to a Halloween party, presaging more extreme events to come. Once they finally arrive, the festivities themselves take a surprising and violent turn that will haunt Val for years. Haroutunian’s precise, understated prose sets up the questions that expand in the fourteen stories that follow: what does it feel like to grow older, to mature? How do people grapple with ambition, both artistic and personal? How do the relationships of early adulthood evolve? How does one salvage the pleasure and wash away the rest? That last question is top of mind for Val in “Twenty-One” as she cleans her face: “I want to remove egg, retain glitter.”
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
Taylor’s second novel, set in Iowa City, follows a range of people at various stages of financial, professional, and artistic success. Fear of debt and the fact of debt cast a shadow over this landscape; the financial preoccupation feels especially vivid when Fyodor, who works in meat processing, attends a party at a gallery. Gazing at his fellow party attendees, Fyodor thinks: “They were anonymous, elegant people who seemed part of a different species […] Nothing in his life had anything to do with this place.” Fyodor’s anguish leads to a public outburst. In a gallery at a party, Fyodor becomes—unwittingly, and unbidden—his own temporary installation, a thing to be observed. Later, in the car, he asks his (sometimes) boyfriend, Timo, “‘Did you have a good time?’” The question reads as both perfunctory and absurd, and Timo’s response: “‘No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,’” is unsurprising. This brief exchange holds several of the novel’s overarching questions, as does the landscape of the party itself: questions of money and pleasure, public behavior and private sorrow.
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
This story collection, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, is chock-full of parties; one wonders how many times the word “gin” appears. There are fundraisers and dinners, vacations and holidays, often set in the suburbs of New York City, and there is always a sizzling undercurrent of desire—sometimes for another person, sometimes for escape from the party, sometimes, somehow, for what is already there. Under the sparkly décor and chiming glass, these stories are piercing, haunting, and deeply melancholy. Cheever’s masterful ability to build tension allows seemingly cheery exchanges (“‘Why, thank you for coming!’”) to introduce a worrisome chill to the sprawling gatherings. Insincerity blazes as brightly as the jewelry at these endless social events. This quote from “The Children” says it all: “It was not the Mackenzies’ idea of a good party. Helen Jackson tried unsuccessfully to draw them into the circle of hearty, if meaningless, smiles, salutations, and handshakes upon which that party, like every other, was rigged.”
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
Shipstead’s debut, set in an East Coast island town, follows the Van Meter family—Winn, Biddy, and their daughters Daphne and Livia—over the course of Daphne’s wedding weekend. The novel is playful in its treatment of the Van Meters’ extensive wealth and avoids deriding it. Shipstead takes care to truly develop these characters, both acknowledging their material comfort and exploring the limitless hunger for more that persists despite all they have. For Winn, this desire includes a reckless, if often comic, desire for Agatha, one of Daphne’s bridesmaids. The beauty of the Van Meters’ world is rendered without excluding its fissures and flaws; a glossy aspirational tale this is not. As he prepares to join his family on the island, Winn is wary of what lies ahead: “[N]ot a straightforward exercise in familial peacekeeping and obligatory cheer but a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done.”
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
One of Strout’s most complex and unforgettable characters, Olive Kitteridge anchors the majority of these linked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is jarringly blunt, but she is also consumed by compassion for her neighbors, and is often the voice, or offers the literal hand, that hauls people out of despair. At her son’s wedding reception, Olive finds even the slightest sensory detail to be antagonistic: other people’s clothing, the sound of a door closing, the odor of a guest’s perfume. Against the backdrop of the wedding—a “smallish, pleasant affair”—and the reception that follows, Strout reveals that beneath Olive’s gruff refusal to play along is deep-seated fear. Of the newlyweds, Olive has an astonishing flicker of silent insight: “They think they’re finished with loneliness.” Overwhelmed with conflicted feelings for her son—her desire for his happiness, and her doubt that he may have found it—she hides away from the party in his bedroom. Even lying on a bed in the middle of a party, she cannot achieve the solitude or peace she’s seeking—people keep coming to the door. Strout uses the chatter and fragrance of the party, the niceties and rituals, to put Olive’s thoughts about love and fear in sharp relief.
Friends of the Museum by Heather McGowan
Friends of the Museum is a gorgeous and very funny whirlwind of a novel, packed with characters aplenty—there are enough of them to justify a “Cast of Characters” list before the novel begins. This is just right for the occasion at hand: The hours preceding a fundraising gala at a New York City museum. Pivoting rapidly from one character to the next, McGowan drums up the frenetic energy required to pull off such a magnificent event. The novel’s commitment to such a range of voices—from the Curator of Film to the Chief Security Officer—reflects the enormous volume of labor and planning behind these major events and institutions. As McGowan intuitively knows, they are also the perfect, insular setting for scandals, of which there are many, all exacerbated by the fact of the gala itself. The demands of the party push each character to their limit; the occasion drains them of pretense and forces their secrets into the carefully curated light.
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
Barrett’s novel follows two superb story collections (Young Skins and Homesickness) and features a cast of unnerving, violent, clever characters. Dev Hendrick—quiet son of an ill, absent father and dead mother—agrees to let his home serve as a satellite for criminal enterprise. Barrett presents the story out of chronological order, and deepens the painful suspense—what will happen to Doll English?—by describing the party at which Doll is kidnapped in exacting, granular detail. Excruciatingly, Doll spends several minutes at this ill-fated gathering describing an earlier party, in which his brother “‘did tear the lobe a bit’” on another man’s ear. In the world Barrett creates in these pages, social activity is always laced with potential danger.
Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian
Set in an ever-changing, beautifully rendered San Francisco, Edgarian’s novel is the story of Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch and their family, friends, and colleagues. Within minutes of meeting Lena and Charlie, the reader is ushered into the first of several parties, a New Year’s Eve celebration hosted at the Pepper/Rusch home. Edgarian uses the event to introduce a rich and varied group of characters and circumstances, including the crucial conflict: Charlie, a surgeon who needs funding for a medical invention, secures that funding from Lena’s wealthy, paternal uncle, Cal. Lena happens to detest Cal for his long-ago affair with her mother; worse, Cal employs Lena’s ex. A second party, in honor of Cal’s daughter’s engagement, brings Lena and her ex together, raising the stakes and complicating Lena’s life and marriage.