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.
. . . So Well Read. . . 