Review by New York Times Review
Marriage, career, life - disappointment comes from everywhere in these Joshua Ferris stories. IT IS LATE on a spring afternoon in Brooklyn. Sarah sits on her balcony, sipping a glass of wine, gazing down at the neighbors laughing on their brownstone stoops. A mystical sort of breeze arrives, one of "maybe a dozen in a lifetime," tickling the undersides of leaves and Sarah, too, who now finds herself restless with longing for something new, for anything but the same old thing. Her husband comes home. "What should we do tonight?" she asks. "I don't care," Jay says. "What do you want to do?" As most battered and seaworthy veterans of relationships eventually know, this is not the best response to a mate who feels herself to be in a sudden existential quandary, who, anointed by a breeze, is looking for something more than just another latenight superhero movie and familiar takeout sandwich. Bad though a spouse may be who dictates the marital laws, equally awful is the passive partner who simply goes along for every ride. In that vexed, trembling fashion begins "The Breeze," one of several standout stories in Joshua Ferris's new collection, "The Dinner Party," a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion. Richard Yates once published a collection called "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness." With 11 stories of its own, "The Dinner Party" might comparably have been titled "Eleven Kinds of Crazy." Coupledom, in particular, is shown to be a nearly hallucinatory proposition, involving those alternative realities commonly known as husband and wife, who suffer veiled and separate lives side by side, breathing in squalid proximity "the stale tenement air of married life," as Ferris puts it. With its overlapping and often irreconcilable scenes, "The Breeze" beautifully embodies Sarah's uncertainty about what she desires from the evening, not to mention the rest of her life. In the interminable course of a single night, Sarah and Jay do and do not make it to Central Park for a picnic, they do and do not enjoy sex in a dark knot of trees in the park, they do and do not endure dinner at a mediocre Italian restaurant, and - finally - they do and do not stay together. No matter the antithetical sequences, however, they always face "the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach." Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, selfconsciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris's characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication. Cellphones, for instance, serve as inadvertent agents of chaos, as in "Fragments," when a wife butt-dials her husband, who picks up and overhears a static-ridden dialogue between wife and lover. "Just wish . . . could spend the night . . . hungry all right, but not for. . . . " With a cacophony of New York yammer (eavesdropped in bars, offices, streets) threaded throughout, the story runs the danger of being a mere exercise, clever, technically adroit, but lacking soul. Instead, it is devastating. Night after night, the protagonist waits in bed for his wife, a lawyer working overtime on a case (so she says), to arrive home. But even when she does, they never connect. The city speaks to him in an array of untethered voices, like a Ouija board writ large, delivering shards of a narrative in which he has no place, as is also true of his splintering marriage. As befits the era of social media, in which self-advertisement is ubiquitous and image rules, the characters in "The Dinner Party" view their lives as scripts or online profiles in need of constant revision. The protagonist of "The Pilot," an actual writer, albeit for a TV program he's attempting to sell, second-guesses himself at every turn, scratching out one persona, trying on another, forever afflicted by "the pedestrian sorrows of social anxiety." The enemy, he decides, is "thought - looping destructive gnawing thought." Having borrowed, then rejected, his roommate's "bad-ass" jacket as potentially uncool, he decides at last to model himself at a Hollywood party after "Coach" from a popular TV series. He saunters unrecognized among the guests, sporting a ball cap and blue windbreaker, and chewing on a toothpick. Networking is half his job, he has realized. "And what was the better option - going to the party of the year, to which he'd been invited, and networking with actors and executives? Or returning home to Atlanta to die? . . . So what the protocol for air-kissing hello kept shifting on him?" As he flounders in a swimming pool in the wee hours of the party, he's planning once again, though perhaps belatedly, to change his life. It would be tragic if it weren't so funny, and vice versa. That same interplay between buffoonery and pathos animates "More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?)," an apparent precursor to or outtake from "Then We Came to the End," Ferris's extraordinary first novel. The title character, who works in advertising in Chicago, spends the night at the office, leaving confessions of love on the voice mail of a co-worker who is married and pregnant. He spies through borrowed binoculars on workers in high-rises across the way, does some redecorating of offices down the hall, steals cigarettes and lies down on the floor for a smoke and a nap, only to be discovered by the cleaning lady, the two of them sharing "in the recognition of catching and being caught doing something human." This is a Marxist critique of late capitalism, as in Groucho Marxist. Like "Then We Came to the End," an exhilarating depiction of cubicle culture, "More Abandon" succeeds not just because of its deeply informed sendup of white-collar workday rituals, but also because of its warmth toward the very same. One detects in Ferris, a former ad copywriter, a freelancer's unanticipated nostalgia for the communalism of gossip by the copy machine and desultory Nerf ball tossing. The final story, "A Fair Price," features yet another self-involved, largely clueless dolt, but this guy lacks even the minor charms of his neurotic predecessors. No other story in "The Dinner Party" ends so violently. Jack hires Mike, an apparently down-and-out day laborer, for 20 bucks an hour, to help empty out a storage unit. He tries to engage his hired hand in inane and unreciprocated chitchat, and has gone so far as to bring him a croissant from Le Perche, a fancy French bakery, which he can't decide whether to give him. "What are we here for?" Jack asks Mike. "Is it just to move things? Or do we have some greater purpose?" In response to his boss's attempts at rapport, Mike grunts and says things like "huh?" and "what?" Jack's resentment builds; he can't stand it whenever Mike takes a break to talk or text on his phone. Jack suffers from a kind of class insecurity as experienced by an employer who fears he is being condescended to by his employee. When Jack's paranoia finally escapes his lips in a mad outpouring similar to the guilt-ridden narrator's of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," he beats his hired hand to a pulp. It's a cringe-worthy spectacle of the sort that occurs when a solipsist free-floating through the universe collides with an actual human being. For some accomplished novelists - and Ferris is one of the best of our day - short stories are mere doodles, warm ups or warm downs, slight variations on themes better addressed at length. In culinary terms appropriate to the collection's title, appetizers. Not so for Ferris. Dynamic with speed, yet rich with novelistic density, his stories make "The Dinner Party" a full-fledged feast, especially for readers with a particular taste for the many flavors of American crazy. The jaded couples in these tales breathe in squalid proximity 'the stale tenement air of married life.' WILL BLYTHE is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever" and the editor of "Why I Write."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 5, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, 2014) has a sure hand when it comes to the nuances of interpersonal relationships. He knows the thin line between awkward and easy, and when silence between two people can be a sign of strain or comfort. Ferris walks this territory so well that we often see our own complicated selves reflected in his writing. His characters in this collection of stories may or may not be in relationships, but it doesn't matter they're almost all lonely and mired in self-doubt. In A Night Out, Tom and Sophie's marriage is on thin ice, a fact made worse by an unfortunate series of circumstances that sinks him into deeper trouble as the evening wears on. In Life in the Heart of the Dead, a fortysomething man finds that his life is of little consequence as he spends an afternoon on a guided tour of Prague. Though Ferris' assured collection may seem laced with hints of despair, the stories are full and rounded, sad but often also tinged with humor and rich in empathy.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The stories in this collection, the first from Ferris, bestselling author of Then We Came to the End, explore the fraying psychologies of their protagonists by way of dark humor and understated tragedy. In the excellent, surreal title story, the fissures in a childless couple's marriage become unbridgeable divides after their close friends fail to attend a dinner party. A bereaved Florida widower is sent a prostitute as a birthday present in "The Valetudinarian," an equally great story, while a desperate aspiring screenwriter struggles to make inroads at an industry party in "The Pilot." Despite its magnificent start, subsequent entries like "Fragments" and "The Breeze" read like lesser versions of earlier, better stories. "More Abandon" is a deleted scene from the author's debut novel that probably should have stayed on the proverbial cutting room floor. Nevertheless, even the weaker stories contain moments of sharp levity and intense insight, reminders of the heights the author can achieve when he is able to sustain his immense talent. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This collection captures the male perspective of a complex and emotional world. The stories speak of unhappiness, trauma, mistrust, deception, and love. Many of Ferris's male subjects have been damaged by early childhood events and repeated disappointments. The choices they make in their current lives are dictated by experiences of the past. They often seem mystified by others in their lives, especially women. The main protagonist's perception of an event doesn't always accurately reflect reality. This results in a variety of unexpected outcomes. From the failed dinner party in the title story and the search for the meaning of life on a walking tour of Prague, to the middle manager who never got a life, each story captures a glimpse of the inner workings of the human psyche. Multi-prize-winning novelist Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour) provides insights small and satisfying in these bite-sized stories that evoke real life and bottomless human emotion. VERDICT Fiction lovers, especially fans of the short form, will appreciate this anthology. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/16.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Grimly humorous urban morality tales of men behaving badly and marriages on the rocks.In a collection of 11 previously published short stories, six of which appeared in the New Yorker, Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, 2014, etc.) continues the trick of fitting a bleak moral vision into what feels like the setup for a comedy. In the title story, a nasty husband who thinks he knows exactly how his boring evening will play out gets a big surprise from his dinner guests. Similar comeuppance is visited on the protagonist of "A Night Out," whose attempts to hide his serial cheating from his wife are derailed permanently. Both stories unfold as if they were farces, yet in the end they are tragedies. Another pair of stories feature the inner monologues of deeply neurotic protagonists, Woody Allen-esque guys who overthink their ways to disaster, whether among successful film people at a chic Hollywood party ("The Pilot") or with a laconic mover at a storage unit ("A Fair Price"). While most of Ferris' marriages are heading for divorce, he predicts continued heartbreak for a fatherless boy in "Ghost Town Choir" and depicts the long-term effects of broken families in "The Step Child." "On, astonishingly, six other occasions, when his parents met other people, and fell in love, and married, and ordered the instant integration of two families' lives, their laundry, and their lore (and, to often disastrous effect, their DNA)the Morgans, followed by the Dinardos and the Teahans, on his mother's side; the Winklows, the Andersons, and that insufferable Lee clan, on his father'she had[wanted] nothing more than to return to the bunk bed in his first room, where all the linens and the wall shadows had been under a single, steady proprietorship." Ferris has mastered a kind of fictional sucker punch, and he'll get you every time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
