Title: Dinner Party: A Tragedy
Author: Sarah Gilmartin
Publisher: One
Pages: 260
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
It would be really hard to describe the
plot of Dinner Party; the book is a loose description of the lives of the
members of the Gleeson family, the tragedies that befall them, and the
recollections associated with all the characters.
The book begins with Kate Gleeson
inviting older brothers Peter and Ray, and Ray’s wife, Liz, to dinner to mark
the 16th death anniversary of her fraternal twin, Elaine. But
it isn’t this dinner that gives this book its name. That honour goes to another
dinner, a Christmas dinner, hosted by their mother at their childhood home. The
game of charades that the family plays on one of these dinners is very telling.
But the dinner party that opens the book
is the one that opens the can of worms, at least for us readers. The family has
been wallowing in it for a long time. But it is the dinner party at the close
of the book that gets the book to end with a bang.
The writing was good, but there was a
sense of disjointedness, in the absence of a chronological timeline.
One gets a sense of the siblings being
stuck in their lives, not only on account of the sibling they have lost but
also on account of their mother whose overbearing personality throws a dark
shadow over their lives.
I couldn’t really warm to any of the
characters. Kate was morose and the other characters, despite having moved on
with their lives, still seem held back somehow. Liz was an obnoxious person.
Through the recollections, one gets a
sense of how Kate felt about Elaine, certainly about how Elaine felt about
Kate. Kate, older by six minutes, finds herself left behind by Elaine who has
her periods first, and makes new friends, leaving behind Kate, who still feels
like a child and on the outside of things, compared to her outgoing sister.
The book is more like a detailed
character sketch of all the members of the Gleeson family. Mom Bernadette has
her own drama, and the others are tortured by her mad tantrums as well as her
crazy silences. Everything is always about her; her grief, her sorrow, her
needs. If it isn’t, she succeeds in drawing attention to herself.
Kate suffers from eating disorders and a
vague sense of emptiness after the death of her twin.
The book is very demanding of the
reader. It demands patience while it reveals itself. Given its lack of a plot,
it leaves us struggling to hold on to something.
The book cover, with its broken plate,
indicates that the dinner has broken convention, and that one by one, the adult
children show their mother that they are tired of skirting around her
feelings.
(I read this book on Edelweiss. Thank you to the author, the publisher and Edelweiss.)
No comments:
Post a Comment