In the new JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith mystery story, The Silkworm, the hero, private investigator Cormoran Strike, attends a toxic dinner party. It's his own fault: he brings a date without warning his hostess, who has invited another single woman. He decides he dislikes the children who keep interrupting. He talks too much about his current case (no client confidentiality?). Galbraith/Rowling seems to want us to sympathize with Strike, but it is obviously a bad night for everyone.
Meanwhile in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wonderful recent Americanah, there are two matching dinner parties, one in New York one in London, with uncomfortable talk, clashing cultures, and an open and not particularly friendly discussion about race. But in a key phrase we are told that one hostess doesn't mind because "unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things". Is that why we love reading about them, too? – there are plenty of almost heroically bad dinner parties simmering in books.
Helen Fielding stitched up the Smug Marrieds bullying the Singleton in Bridget Jones's Diary back in 1996, Bridget feeling like Miss Havisham and longing to say "I'm not married because … underneath my clothes, my entire body is covered in scales". Bridget can also manage to give a dreadful dinner party – blue soup – a tradition that continues with the American writers Sloane Crosley ("Trevor wants to have a threesome with someone at the table and you are the only single girl there") and Rebecca Harrington (one guest "pulls out a huge bag of chips and starts eating them in front of me".)
Elaine Dundy's 1958 The Dud Avocado, about a young American woman living the Bohemian life in Paris, contains a terrific description of the guests having to work hard for their simple meal – "all four of us ceaselessly moiling and toiling from kitchen and studio and back again" to transport all the food. Then there's poor Becky Sharp at the beginning of Thackeray's Vanity Fair: flirting a little at dinner, she says everything from India must be good. She takes a mouthful of an unknown dish called curry, and then Joseph Sedley says "Try a chili with it Miss Sharp". So naturally she thinks that will be cooling. "She would have liked to choke old Sedley, but she swallowed her mortification as well as she had the abominable curry before it."
Misunderstandings are never good – in Jonathan Raban's Waxwings (a novel set in Seattle around the millennium, published 2003) Beth thinks she has cracked it socially when her wealthy boss invites her over. It turns out that it is a large charitable event, she and her husband are expected to donate $1000 to the cause, and she is wildly over-dressed in her expensive Calvin Klein gown.
Nick Hornby does "out-of-place at the dinner party" from the man's point of view in High Fidelity – Rob tracks down an old girlfriend, Charlie, and is invited to dinner: "When I walk into the sitting room, I can see immediately that I am doomed to die a long, slow, suffocating death." Everyone else has dogs, careers, skiing holidays. Rob only has his record shop. He has a terrible time, but Hornby cleverly does not make Rob hate or blame these people: he envies them, he is looking to see where his own life has gone wrong.
In The Silver Linings Playbook – Matthew Quick's novel on which the 2012 Oscar-winning film was based – a dinner party is arranged so the difficult and socially-challenged Pat and Tiffany can meet each other. Pat wears a football jersey, and says the wrong thing, then neither of them has any small talk. Their hosts – anxious for the relationship to work – fill up the silence: "Pat is a big history buff, ask him anything … Tiff is a dancer … She loves picnics. Do you love picnics?" As Pat describes it "they trade facts about their guests for fifteen minutes straight". The evening ends with Tiffany flatly offering Pat sex "as long as we turn the lights out first". Things can only get better.
The worst guest award must go to Princess Margaret in a completely fictional (of course) account of an upmarket dinner party in Edward St Aubyn's Some Hope (1994). The French Ambassador accidentally spills sauce on the Princess's dress, and she imperiously insists he gets down on his knees under the table to scrub away at the stain with a napkin and water. The Princess is a monster: convinced she is funny and charming when she is the opposite.
More posh dinner parties come in Anthony Powell. A Buyer's Market, the second in the Dance to the Music of Time series and set in 1928, is just one social event after another. There is a full-scale grand pompous dinner, after which the guests all troop off to "the Huntercombes' dance", where now they are naturally in need of a solid supper of lobster salad. And it is here that Barbara empties the sugar castor over Widmerpool, a very significant event – you'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't, well, Widmerpool.
Muriel Spark's Symposium (1990) is one giant dinner party, which is not going to end well, with the secondary stories slotted in amongst the preparations for the dinner.
There are dinners that are planned to be dreadful in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus (in both cases, don't ask what's on the menu), but in Macbeth the man himself is not expecting to have his banquet ruined by a ghostly apparition. Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall thinks a lot about a feast in Ancient Greece where the roof falls in and everyone dies except the poet Simonides. Belshazzar's Feast in the Bible's Book of Daniel has the note of true drama, as a hand appears to create the original, actual writing on the wall.
Other meals can go wrong, too: the first book of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End contains surely the best and funniest breakfast in fiction, featuring a gatecrasher, a fugitive from justice, and a clergyman and literary critic whose hostly duties are going to be rather lost in the fact that he is completely mad, and obsessed with sex – luckily, a lot of what he says is in Latin so not quite everyone catches his drift. The only answer is to 'punch him in the kidney' (part of his body, not the breakfast item).
There must be many more awful dinners in fiction worth digesting. Which is most exquisitely awful dinner party you would most or least like to have attended – or avoided?
