Review: "The Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris

There are writers who are downright master of the short form almost exclusively, the obvious names that come to mind being Raymond Carver and George Saunders who made their name just from their short stories and there are masters of both short and long form storytelling, like Haruki Murakami and Joe hill to name a just two. Joshua Ferris fits too comfortably into a third category of a writer who’s only a master of novels, because his first collection of short stories, The Dinner Party, is dramatically uneven, with some stories working magnificently and some making me want to hold my nose. It doesn’t help that all of the 11 stories here are over 20 pages. It makes the stories that don’t work drag on, repeating techniques that fail to engage the reader and making me feel relieved once I had finished them. I’ll start out with the good ones, such as the title story that opens this collection. It follows a couple whose conversational daggers, while playful superficially hide an underlying malice. They are preparing for a dinner party with some old friends. It is obvious they have grown apart when they don’t arrive on time, and when the man ventures out to the friends house, he is met by brutal reality check. With stories like these and The Valetudinarian, where an elderly man celebrates a birthday only to have his life saved by a prostitute his friend orders, Ferris is able to demonstrate our tenuous connections to one another in shorter forms. But then you have stories like “Fragments” and “The Stepchild” which switch up perspectives and feel like shallow literary stunts. The collection ends strongly with “A Fair Price” a story about a man unable to talk with the person helping him move that is rich in ambiguity and sadness. Not a terrible collection, but after three homerun novels, this is easily the most tepid thing Ferris has put out.

Rating: 4/5