Joshua Ferris's "The Dinner Party"

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy makes mention of a certain line in the social scale above which "the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling"(128). In his wonderfully annotated edition of Tess, Tim Dolin defines the French term convenances as "conventional proprieties"(513).

The unnammed husband in Joshua Ferris's short story "The Dinner Party" (The New Yorker, August 11 & 18, 2008) tests Hardy's assertion. While he would seem to have little time for the social niceties, the proprieties (unless you're inclined to classify anger as a natural feeling), he's cramped and limited in his emotional expressions. Although he continually apologizes, he never lets off a vicious and misanthropic sarcasm that is initially kind of funny. However, lacking any sorts of limits, as it gradually reveals the depths of bitterness and hurt underlying it, his brand of sarcasm grows at once scary and boring.


While this man and his wife Amy prepare for a dinner party with Amy's best friend and her husband, Amy's husband bemoans the predictability of what is to follow. He finds the guests they're awaiting boring, conventional. The guests are coming to announce they're expecting a child and the host-husband, already aware of the surprise, sneeringly predicts "we'll take in the news like we're genuinely surprised-like holy shit, can you believe she's knocked up....and that's just the worst, how predictable our response to their so-called news will be"(81). His wife tells him that he should "suggest they have an abortion" and they could do so here with a little champagne, he jokingly but tellingly responds "that would shake things up...Delightful...I'm in."

At the outset, his wife seems a willing participant in his no-holds barred verbal bomb throwing: according to him, "she spoke to him in bad taste freely and he considered it one of her best qualities"(81). However, it quickly becomes clear that she can't keep up with him and her efforts to do so are forced. Indeed, as they prepare and then wait for their increasingly late 'guests' to arrive, a divide between the two becomes apparent. As she increasingly grows tense and critical of him, he reveals a child-like dependence on her. Yet, he can never lay off the barbs entirely. As with many insecure folks, it would seem constantly firing out becomes a method of self-protection.

The evening and the couple quickly go off the rails. A story that begins with a bitter but content couple preparing for an ordinary dinner party turns into the portrait of a marriage long in a free-fall and soon to crash. Amy's husband begins the evening dreading it will be all predictable. And, the evening turns out in a predictable fashion: predictable to the reader who can read this couple from a reader's distanced yet near and clear-eyed fashion. However, it doesn't turn out as he predicted. Although he might not have faced it, the end that comes on the evening of the story is predictable. He just didn't see it coming that night.

This is an interesting little piece. I believe Ferris intended to demonstrate the way huge fissures can be hidden just under the surface of the most seemingly amicable and ordinary marriages. To the extent that the couple's marriage appeared strange to me from the start, when the fissure reared its head, I was not that surprised at its presence. Still, challenging those who eschew the social niceties, the proprieties, that make society, even a society of two, possible, it provided a welcome conservative perspective on society and marriage.