The stories in Joshua Ferris's new collection, The Dinner Party and Other Stories, are on first glance of a type well known in MFA workshops. All but one feature upper-middle-class characters in cities or suburbs; all but two feature characters between roughly twenty-five and forty years of age; all but three involve heavy alcohol consumption. Characters smoke expensive cigarettes, go out to chic restaurants, and host titular dinner parties featuring gourmet meats and cheeses. It would be easy for the casual shopper to roll his eyes at this book and move over to the Classic Lit shelves to see if he can get some Melville or Fitzgerald for his 25 hard-earned American dollars.
As our casual shopper intuits, these stories do have real weaknesses. A generation ago David Foster Wallace noticed that Gen Y-ers and Millennials actually sound stilted and odd by the standards of previous generations, but there is still such a thing as dialogue that is just bad and untrue-sounding. ("'I'm trying to be helpful.' 'Your help isn't worth a good goddamn anymore,' she said.") The contemporary fixations of the under-forty set are fronted in a way that is annoying rather than atmospheric. Food descriptions might have made sense during Waugh's war-era deprivations, but any urban party in 2017 can be assumed to have artifacts of decadence like "figs wrapped in bacon, caramelized in a homemade glaze."
Likewise, more deliberate efforts at lyricism are too often incoherent and otiose: "The sun was never so part of the earth's essence as when its golden meniscus quivered at the edge of the horizon just over Arty's balcony, coloring the clouds and restoring to the sky all the pastoral visions of the earliest era, and filling his condo (furnished with wicker and cushion) with the light of a dying day." By and large, the use of language betrays a want of editorial aggression. These shortcomings are especially disappointing coming from the author of the superbly wrought Then We Came to the End, whose plot was little more than a vehicle for conveying a particular tone and atmosphere.
Nevertheless, passing this collection by would be a mistake. There's something more afoot here than American Spirits and rack of lamb and golden menisci. Ferris respects his characters enough to punish them, and he punishes them by the standards of a morality that is aggressively conventional and even archaic: characters suffer for infidelity, alcoholism, vanity, anger—a Victorian cabinet of culpable vice. There is no valorization of flaws here, nor even Junot Diaz's moral diffidence; ugliness is just ugliness. Then We Came to the End and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour recalled Bellow’s zanier moments, but The Dinner Party reminds the reader of no one so much as Flannery O’Connor. When Bellow is echoed here, it's Seize the Day rather than Augie March. A character who drinks too much drowns. An unfaithful wife comes home to find her husband giving away all their shared possessions. A man carries the flame for a married coworker and experiences a psychotic break.
So, for all the failures of prose and overfamiliar stock characters and situations, The Dinner Party and Other Stories delivers something refreshing: a fiction based on a hard moral clarity, rather than the soft and sentimental dispensations of Philip Roth and Anne Tyler. Ferris's project seems to be a revolt to maturity. The heroes of Then We Came to the End were the characters who strove to eliminate explicit drama from their lives and get down to the work at hand. The Dinner Party presents the negative formulation: acting on romantic or sentimental inclinations is the cause of suffering. The only story in the collection with what can be called a happy ending, "The Breeze," presents that ending as a direct consequence of the main character’s conscious rejection of romanticism.
Ferris's execution falls short of the standards he has set in earlier work, but his stance is compelling. It sets the ambitions of The Dinner Party far above much else that is currently being published under the heading of literary fiction, and that alone should give our skeptical bookstore patron a reason to give it a chance.