It’s amazing how quickly the world has changed; when I see pictures of things that seemed normal a couple of weeks ago, like people crowding onto the subway or attending a Broadway show, I shudder. Don’t they know they should be social distancing? But at the same time, I yearn for connection. When will we be able to go to parties, movies, Seders, or even our offices again? I find myself thinking about Jessica Francis Kane’s Rules for Visiting (Penguin Press, 2019), a lovely novel about a self-sufficient woman who uses an unexpected month off from her job as a university gardener to visit four friends she hadn’t seen for a long time. Our reviewer called May “a winningly eccentric heroine in love with trees and literature,” and her vulnerable journey toward connection may provide a blueprint for the months ahead.
Or maybe it would be fun to experience a fictional crowd—and what’s more crowded than a football stadium on Thanksgiving Day? Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, 2012) follows a squad of U.S. soldiers on leave from Iraq as they’re featured in the halftime show at the Dallas Cowboys game alongside Destiny’s Child (yes, there’s a walk-on from Beyoncé). “War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity,” according to our starred review.
Douglas Hobbie’s The Day (Holt, 1993) also takes place over the course of a single Thanksgiving, as a family gathers in Connecticut for their annual feast. Hobbie’s writing is intense and funny, and his scenes of family tension are so precise you’ll find yourself ducking for cover.
If you’ve been missing book parties, there are a few options. Olivia Goldsmith’s The Bestseller (HarperCollins, 1996) will plunge you into a world of expensive lunches and gala parties that was disappearing long before the new coronavirus made its appearance. Here’s the gossip at one of the parties: “Everyone had to scramble for bestsellers now just to keep in the business. Look at what had happened at Knopf—another house known for its great literary fiction: When Sonny Mehta had taken over that venerable firm, he acquired Dean Koontz!” OK, so Goldsmith couldn’t see the future, in which Knopf managed to maintain its literary reputation under Mehta, but her book is still a tremendous amount of fun. Kirkus said it was “told with intelligence, wit, and shameless enthusiasm”: I love it when reviews from our archive agree with me!
Written more recently but also looking back to publishing’s past is The Last Book Party by Karen Dukess (Holt, 2019), a coming-of-age novel in which a young woman gets a job as an assistant to a famous writer in 1987 Cape Cod. “Written with fresh confidence and verve, this first novel is a bibliophile’s delight, with plenty of title-dropping and humorous digs at the publishing scene of the 1980s,” our review said. And it all winds up at a book costume party.
Margaret Drabble throws parties in many of her books. The Radiant Way (Knopf, 1987) opens in 1979 at a New Year’s Eve party for 200 people during which Liz, the hostess, discovers through innuendo and indiscretion that her husband is planning to leave her for one of their guests. The book follows Liz and two of her friends over the next five years, as their lives change and Britain changes under Margaret Thatcher. When I interviewed Drabble many years ago, she said, “I enjoy getting unlikely people together, which is what parties are for.” Here’s looking forward to attending parties in the real world, not on Zoom, before too long.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
