David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "moody"
Dinner Party
Joshua Ferris has been voted one of the top twenty young writers under the age of forty. I've read THEN WE CAME TO THE END and TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR. Both were excellent. He was up for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and the MAN BOOKER PRIZE.
I can't say the same for this anthology of short stories. About the best of the lot was the last one “A Fair Price”. It's about a man who hires an independent mover to help him clean out his storage shed for twenty dollars an hour. Jack tries to make pleasant conversation with the man, but all he gets in return are grunts or total silence. Then it gets to be a contest about manhood. Mike, the mover, takes time out to talk on his phone but he won't talk to Jack. Jack calls him on it. Eventually their animosity leads to fisticuffs, and Jack realizes he has to make a decision that will tell us as readers what kind of man he really is.
Another one, “More Abandon,” is about a man who can't bear to go home after work, although his co-workers fight to get out of the place. He borrows field glasses and looks in the windows of the building across the street. He raids various offices of his fellow co-workers. He calls a married woman and tells her he loves her, five times. He has a chance to erase the messages, but he hits “send”. He spends the rest of the night trying to figure out how to erase the messages. Then he falls asleep in one of the offices, only to be found by a coworker who doesn't seem all that shocked that he's been sleeping in her office.
Most of the stories concern some kind of dinner or dinner party, hence the title. In his acknowledgments, Ferris thanks his agent and his wife for not confusing the author with “his awful, male characters who in turn embolden the author to make those characters more male and awful still.” I didn't think they were awful. I've even met people like some of them, but I didn't like any of them.
I can't say the same for this anthology of short stories. About the best of the lot was the last one “A Fair Price”. It's about a man who hires an independent mover to help him clean out his storage shed for twenty dollars an hour. Jack tries to make pleasant conversation with the man, but all he gets in return are grunts or total silence. Then it gets to be a contest about manhood. Mike, the mover, takes time out to talk on his phone but he won't talk to Jack. Jack calls him on it. Eventually their animosity leads to fisticuffs, and Jack realizes he has to make a decision that will tell us as readers what kind of man he really is.
Another one, “More Abandon,” is about a man who can't bear to go home after work, although his co-workers fight to get out of the place. He borrows field glasses and looks in the windows of the building across the street. He raids various offices of his fellow co-workers. He calls a married woman and tells her he loves her, five times. He has a chance to erase the messages, but he hits “send”. He spends the rest of the night trying to figure out how to erase the messages. Then he falls asleep in one of the offices, only to be found by a coworker who doesn't seem all that shocked that he's been sleeping in her office.
Most of the stories concern some kind of dinner or dinner party, hence the title. In his acknowledgments, Ferris thanks his agent and his wife for not confusing the author with “his awful, male characters who in turn embolden the author to make those characters more male and awful still.” I didn't think they were awful. I've even met people like some of them, but I didn't like any of them.
