...a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion ... Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, self-consciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris’s characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication ... For some accomplished novelists — and Ferris is one of the best of our day — short stories are mere doodles, warm ups or warm downs, slight variations on themes better addressed at length. In culinary terms appropriate to the collection’s title, appetizers. Not so for Ferris. Dynamic with speed, yet rich with novelistic density, his stories make The Dinner Party a full-fledged feast, especially for readers with a particular taste for the many flavors of American crazy.
The Dinner Party is filled with men who become so unhinged you're tempted to call a carpenter ... Ferris' narratives usually proceed from the ordinary to an uncomfortable and sometimes bizarre escalation of strangeness or disaster. The overarching message is that stability is elusive and certainly not a given ... Ferris finesses the line between tragedy and comedy, and his sly wit often surfaces in sarcastic, offbeat ways ... As e.e. cummings so succinctly put it, 'Unbeing dead isn't being alive.' Ferris' unmoored souls struggle with living death — along with pathological insecurity and fear of abandonment. While the stories in this book don't particularly advance this talented writer's career, The Dinner Party provides a fine showcase for his work.
Even if later stories aren’t quite as inspired, they are never dull; as the collection draws on, though, Ferris’s themes, so powerful when encountered in the individual stories, begin to overlap and repeat ... There are a lot of jilted young men in here, awash in their own pain and not particularly interested in what their own roles might have been in the dissolution of their relationships. When reading them in one volume, a reader might hunger for the tales to be as wide-ranging in their empathies as they are in their storylines. Then again, why shake things up when these stories are so good at capturing this particular sort of funny, panicked and melancholy man? ... Ferris is an incisive observer, and his descriptions of even the most quotidian situations are elegant and fresh.
Some stories feel underdeveloped. A few of the marriages gone awry blur together. Others, however, widen Ferris’ range and prove stunning feats of compassion ... It’s Ferris’ great gift, and, indeed, readers will surely be struck dumb with empathy for these memorable cranks and depressives.
His male characters mess up, in small and spectacular fashion, but their misdeeds often prompt our sympathy, thanks to Ferris’s insightful narration. What’s even more delightful is that his stories show men behaving badly in the most ordinary settings ... Ferris elegantly plumbs the comically misguided mind-set of this narcissist, who, at the very least, is aware of his narcissism and, therefore comes off as more decent than he otherwise should.
Ferris continues the trick of fitting a bleak moral vision into what feels like the setup for a comedy ... Ferris has mastered a kind of fictional sucker punch, and he’ll get you every time.
Put a one-dimensional jerk at the center of a story and it dies on the page. The Dinner Party is a parade of such jerks who march by one by one, usually onto a punishment neatly arranged to show just how bad their author knows them to be. Occasionally he spares them, a testament to the mercies of their virtuous and similarly one-dimensional wives ... The stories in The Dinner Party that don’t take a preposterous turn tend instead to pile on the clichés. This might work if the clichés were ironized or if the characters had inner lives, but the stock scenarios are deployed in earnest, and inside the characters’ heads we find bundles of pat insecurities ... In short, they’re charmless, Which is the worst way to be an asshole. John Cheever is rolling in his grave.
The stories are constructed with great care, combining beady-eyed observation with farce, black comedy and occasional moments of lyricism. Ferris never tells us in so many words that his protagonists are awful, but their selfishness, narcissism, neediness and moral idiocy are the recurring notes of the collection ... The stories are thoughtful, mordant and funny, with a tendency towards farce that will divide readers ... My big cavil with the book is this: as a man – and, full disclosure, a somewhat American man – I found its troupe of grotesques exhausting company. The stories so thoroughly impugn their characters for selfishness and delusion that I began to bristle...I closed the book wanting to send the author a copy of Robert Bly’s Iron John – or some Walt Whitman, perhaps, a less ironical Brooklynite who loved men, and found in them beauty and spirit and resourcefulness.
Some collections cohere around a theme; Joshua Ferris’s enormously enjoyable stories in The Dinner Party are more unified by a feeling. The nature of this feeling is challenging to pinpoint, but it still seems supremely specific. Not nihilism, not misanthropy, but a very modern aimlessness … Ferris really nails contemporary insecurity. Was Leonard’s fulsome, chatty email accepting the invitation too long-winded?...In a world of rampant ‘communication’ where people rarely speak to each other, this embarrassing convolution is actually the way we think … The male characters are all, dare I say it, losers. In their very awfulness, they are heartbreaking.
Comedy is itself a rhetorical device, and a joke is an argument in perfect miniature. So there’s a logic in a writer of Ferris’s rhetorical facility having equal facility with humor. But many writers are funny, and what sets Ferris apart is his ethical sense, the way his carefully tooled comedic engines turn larger wheels of moral inquiry ... At its best, Ferris’s comic style mimics in language the faulty thinking of his characters, exposing the way people become caught in their own mental processes like factory workers falling into the teeth of great gears. In doing so, these stories propose better ways to survive and live, to be. That this often produces grisly humor and laughs is a secondary, though extremely welcome, effect.
...even the weaker stories contain moments of sharp levity and intense insight, reminders of the heights the author can achieve when he is able to sustain his immense talent.
...[a] compelling new book of short stories ... Ferris' writing is dark, funny and cold. He does not display warmth or sympathy for his characters. And while he repeatedly illustrates the danger in sacrificing the present for fantasy, Ferris is not trying to diagnose a social ill or moralize. Finishing the book, a reader won't come away with newfound energy to enjoy life as it is. Instead, Ferris seems to be saying, this is how people are, and this is how they always will be. We sabotage our happiness, and there's not much anyone can do about it.
