An intimate soiree builds to a horrific climax in this visceral novel about a young woman tasked with hosting a meal for her fiance
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iterature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene – in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage.
The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.
Before we get to all this, though, the novel begins with the words “Stella says I should write a letter”, adding two further literary devices into the mix. For Stella is Franca’s therapist, with whom she now meets regularly to unpack the repercussions of that disastrous evening a year ago, while the entire novel is framed as a correspondence addressed to the enigmatic “Harry”.
