Book Review: Strangers at the Feast

Photo via the author's website

Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast is a quietly impressive, easily underestimated novel. The trick of telling each mini-chapter from a different point of view — there are at least six narrators — at first seems like a tired, kitschy trope, but as the strands of the novel come together and pieces of information that once appeared irrelevant take on new meaning, Vanderbes proves the worth of her Rashomon style of storytelling. On its face, Strangers at the Feast is fluffy women’s lit; it doesn’t fall under the “chick lit” header, exactly, because there is not a bed-hopping cad or a twenty-something woman in Loboutin heels in sight. The bulk of the story focuses on the members of the Olson family, each of whom suffers from some version of suburban bourgeois ennui. The brief chapters devoted to Kijo, a teenager from the projects whose grandmother has been evicted from her home to make way for a shiny new office tower, are meant to give the novel heft, to suggest that it is about “the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty” (as the jacket blurb would have it), rather than a simple story about the hidden wounds and buried hostility that lurk beneath the happy veneer of any family. Some of these pieces fit together when the reader realizes that Kijo’s choice to vandalize the Olsons’ home is not random but instead a carefully designed retribution against the developer (Douglas Olson) who convinced the city that his grandmother’s neighborhood was urban blight. Vanderbes’ exploration of the gap — it is debatable whether her novel shows it to be “dangerously thin” or, on the contrary, gapingly wide — between rich and poor is not entirely convincing, considering the short shrift she gives to Kijo’s character. Still, there is something casually masterful in the way the details of the Olsons’ lives, which ring true to their characters and seem dispensed for no ulterior motive beyond the fleshing out of individual stories, ultimately serve to direct the action of the book’s final scenes. Ginny Olson’s daughter, Priya, adopted after a harrowing childhood in an Indian orphanage, does not speak. This detail, which drives the plot once Kijo breaks into the home and encounters a child he believes is willfully silent, does not read as a trick or a plot device. Instead, the story moves naturally along the paths laid out for it by the participants’ personalities and histories. The reader does not perceive an authorial hand shepherding the plot toward a forced conclusion; rather, the events seem to unfold along the contours of of very real actions and reactions. It is revealed early in the novel that Denise, Douglas Olson’s wife, has learned to fire a gun, but this fact is so consistent with her character and situation that the reader experiences a small but genuine revelation when she picks up a weapon at the end of the book. Vanderbes clearly planned the action, yet to the reader it feels less like a deus ex machina intervention than the only available conclusion given the people involved.

The last few chapters of Strangers at the Feast deal with the aftermath of the break-in and subsequent shooting, and feel tacked-on, like the “where are they now?” epilogue to the Harry Potter series that jumps several decades into the future. Those sort of gimmicks feel like a sop to the unimaginative reader, who demands that all ends be neatly tied up and that no questions about the characters’ intentions or futures remain. Such postscripts are usually unnecessary, and the one attached to the back of Vanderbes’ novel is no exception. Do we really need to know about the police investigation, the litigation, the marital faultlines that fracture completely in the wake of the tragedy? The point of the book, the crucial scene, comes when the various characters act (or don’t act) on the crime committed against them (or, more specifically, against their home). Once Ginny’s brittle, emotionally starved mother fires the gun, her character arc is complete. Vanderbes has spent the previous two hundred pages describing a woman who could conceivably commit murder; once it occurs, what follows is irrelevant. It is perhaps a relief to find out that none of the Olsons end up in jail; though Vanderbes clearly points to the injustice of Kijo’s situation and the racist and classist sentiments that drive the Olsons to shoot a home invader in fairly cold blood, the reader has spent nearly the entire novel eavesdropping on the family and its problems. It is impossible not to be sympathetic toward the Olsons, even toward the self-centered mother. Still, the rushed summation of post-tragedy events is unneeded, and prevents the story from ending on a stylistic high note.

Vanderbes is a good writer, though not of the painfully self-conscious variety epitomized by Nicole Krauss, and the subtlety of her prose is often overshadowed by its serviceable nature. Vanderbes is not a Stephen King, however, whose writing exists more to propel a narrative than to make the reader marvel at a turn of phrase. One metaphor that strikes me as particularly eloquent is this:

Bridgeport was the corner where the rest of Connecticut swept its poverty.

I don’t know enough about Connecticut to evaluate the truth of the statement, but it is an evocative description. Just a few paragraphs later is another gem:

The house made her think, when she first saw it, of the JonBenet Ramsey house, gothic and shadowy, a house so large your child could be murdered in one part and you wouldn’t hear a sound.

The sentence is poignant not only because it foreshadows the events in the Olsons’ own home but because it captures in a few words Ginny Olson’s distaste for the chilly, echoing spaces of her brother’s McMansion. It speaks directly to the tension between the desire for a gaudy, huge house and the suspicion that there is something fundamentally unhealthy about a handful of people rambling about in such a large place.

The strength of Strangers at the Feast pleasantly surprised me. It is not a book that will end up on any “best of” lists, but it is well worth reading, and deserves more attention than it will probably get.

Review: An Imperfect Novel

Read the words of praise — the Times calls it “spectacular” and the Seattle PI dubs it “magnificent” — on the cover of Tom Rachman’s novel, The Imperfectionists, and you’ll begin to wonder how far our of context they were taken. It’s a bit like the P.R. for a movie like “Speed 2”; the poster says it’s “an action-packed thriller” but neglects to include the rest of the review, which may go something like this: “It could have been an action-packed thriller, but instead ‘Speed 2′ lumbers along like a cruise-ship passenger at the buffet.” Perhaps the Times had really meant to brand Rachman’s book “a spectacular failure”?

No. What the Times’ Janet Maslin really had to say was, ” Mr. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular.” She goes on to call the book “a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun.” One wonders if Maslin was more taken with the detailed, cynical descriptions of the newsroom than with the literary merits of the novel. The Imperfectionists is neither original nor ingenious, unless a compendium of interwoven short stories is your idea of original. The structure, much-used of late and crafted with defter hands by Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) and Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteredge), is hardly anything new. Yes, the vignettes hang together nicely, as each takes a character from the never-named paper (another annoying Rachman tic) as its narrator; and yes, the stories are “unified by an overarching tone” that Maslin identifies as “filled with bonhomie but is punctuated by tough, wrenching flourishes,” but Rachman’s prime achievement is confirming that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

The “wrenching flourishes,” also characterized as “firecracker bang[s] of discovery” by Christopher Buckley in the Times’ Sunday Book Review, are in fact rather pat twists in the stories that in no way put Rachman in the leagues of Roald Dahl or O. Henry, two wonderful writers to which he is compared. Each story in The Imperfectionists is so short and the characters so cursorily sketched that these so-called twists elicit nothing more than an idle “ho-hum.” The paper’s financial officer, stumbling into bed with the ex-employee whose firing she orchestrated, plopped as vulnerably and mercilessly on the mattress as a piece of meat, hears the man’s voice go cold:

“One small thing.” His eyes track down her her body. He proceeds, “Tell me this, Accounts Payable.”She freezes at the name.”Why,” he says, “why of all the people there, Accounts Payable, did you go and get me fired?” He stands at the foot of the bed, staring. “So?” he says. “Explain me that.”

The ending is indeed unpredictable, but it is hardly astonishing enough to be labeled a “firecracker.” Likewise, in another story, when the news editor calls his unfaithful wife’s hotel room to apologize for booting her out of the house, the revelation that the person who answers the phone is not his wife — “It is a man’s voice. It is Paolo.” — is hardly a shocker on the level of Roald Dahl’s “The baby is perfectly healthy . . . Frau Hitler.”

The Times review makes much of the way the vignettes’ titles, headlines from the paper such as “U.S. General Optimistic on War,” subtly play out in the narratives. The parallel between “U.S. General” and the paper’s editor in chief, however, strike me as neither subtle nor especially inspired. Buckley claims that the book is “so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off.” No shabby writer himself, Buckley seems to be resorting to massive hyperbole. It’s not that The Imperfectionists is a bad book; rather, it is simply unremarkable. The reader is left to wonder what exactly Rachman pulled off, and whether he or she has failed in a reader’s duty to appreciate top-notch literature.

The unavoidable conclusion, however, is that The Imperfectionists is more an average, middling novel than a supernova of a debut. Publishing must be in a pretty sorry state if writers like Rachman are compared to “those masters hanging in the museums of Rome” (The Plain Dealer). Rachman certainly has insights into human character, but he spends so little emotional energy on each newspaper staffer that the reader hardly has enough invested in the story to raise an eyebrow at the twist of the ending. Perhaps the betrayal of the news editor’s wife would pack more of a punch if the editor were more than another member of the troupe of narrators that parades in and out of the book’s pages. But Rachman has miles to go before he sleeps, and more points about human foibles to make, so he barrels on, abandoning the hapless news editor save for a few cursory appearances in later chapters.

The greatest sin of The Imperfectionists, it turns out, is not that it is an easily forgettable book. It is that the reviews — “finely wrought” and “occasionally breathtaking,” trumpets the Financial Times — provoked more outrageous emotion than the book itself.