Based on the title alone – Dinner Party: A Tragedy – I thought Sarah Gilmartin’s debut novel would be exactly my thing. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
To mark the anniversary of the death of her twin sister, Elaine, Kate meticulously plans a dinner party for her family. However, before dessert can be served, old tensions flare, revealing strained relationships.
The story then rewinds to Ireland in the nineties, when the family was complete – Kate’s parents, Elaine, and her two older brothers. We learn that her mother is an extremely demanding and narcissistic person, who presents one way to the world, and another way to her family.
When Kate’s father dies, and then Elaine, those remaining each deal with their grief differently.
First her father and then her sister – two deaths in one family in a matter of years. You didn’t come back from that. Hereabouts they were no longer the Gleesons, but the poor Gleesons.
Gilmartin focuses predominantly on the relationship between Kate and her mother, with Kate painfully aware that she will never meet her mother’s expectations.
Her mother resented her being alive, and resented her claim on Elaine too. A child’s mother misses them most of all. She had said that to Kate… Her mother had told her to stop monopolizing the pain.
Although the idea of ‘who owns the grief’ is interesting, it was poorly executed, with the addition of distracting subplots (an eating disorder and an ill-fated affair for Kate). As a result, the threads of the various subplots peter-out rather than being resolved in a satisfying way.
My biggest issue with this book was the superfluous detail and, once I noticed the excess, it was everywhere. Felt like I was playing whack-a-mole but with flowery sentences. For example –
…the desk was a glossy, public prison of faux botanical hell. Although her boss Anthony loved to drum the marble counter when he came out to meet clients, to Kate it was just a cold, expensive piece of rock with the ghost of a thousand fingertips. And the stains! The cappuccino froth and ink marks – and once, a baby’s vomit – that tarnished the marble so quickly, so permanently if you didn’t catch them in time, each one noted in the imaginary but extremely real report card that Anthony kept hidden behind his eyes.
and
In the centre of the table, the rice was in a ceramic bowl with a clear glass lid.
and
A blister on her heel was flapping, half-open, a glimpse of ruby.
There were dozens of other examples but essentially united by either imagery being icky (baby vomit, blisters…) or too many words (glass is usually clear… but what does it matter about the rice, anyway?).
I received my copy of Dinner Party: A Tragedy from the publisher, Pushkin Press, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
1.5/5
She ran through the evening’s recipes in her head, visualizing the photo of the Baked Alaska, the sheen of the meringue, the torched golden tips.
As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (July 13): Belfast 10°-20° and Melbourne 9°-17°.