Critique du New York Review of Books

Marriage, career, life - disappointment comes from everywhere in these Joshua Ferris stories. IT IS LATE on a spring afternoon in Brooklyn. Sarah sits on her balcony, sipping a glass of wine, gazing down at the neighbors laughing on their brownstone stoops. A mystical sort of breeze arrives, one of "maybe a dozen in a lifetime," tickling the undersides of leaves and Sarah, too, who now finds herself restless with longing for something new, for anything but the same old thing. Her husband comes home. "What should we do tonight?" she asks. "I don't care," Jay says. "What do you want to do?" As most battered and seaworthy veterans of relationships eventually know, this is not the best response to a mate who feels herself to be in a sudden existential quandary, who, anointed by a breeze, is looking for something more than just another latenight superhero movie and familiar takeout sandwich. Bad though a spouse may be who dictates the marital laws, equally awful is the passive partner who simply goes along for every ride. In that vexed, trembling fashion begins "The Breeze," one of several standout stories in Joshua Ferris's new collection, "The Dinner Party," a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion. Richard Yates once published a collection called "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness." With 11 stories of its own, "The Dinner Party" might comparably have been titled "Eleven Kinds of Crazy." Coupledom, in particular, is shown to be a nearly hallucinatory proposition, involving those alternative realities commonly known as husband and wife, who suffer veiled and separate lives side by side, breathing in squalid proximity "the stale tenement air of married life," as Ferris puts it. With its overlapping and often irreconcilable scenes, "The Breeze" beautifully embodies Sarah's uncertainty about what she desires from the evening, not to mention the rest of her life. In the interminable course of a single night, Sarah and Jay do and do not make it to Central Park for a picnic, they do and do not enjoy sex in a dark knot of trees in the park, they do and do not endure dinner at a mediocre Italian restaurant, and - finally - they do and do not stay together. No matter the antithetical sequences, however, they always face "the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach." Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, selfconsciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris's characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication. Cellphones, for instance, serve as inadvertent agents of chaos, as in "Fragments," when a wife butt-dials her husband, who picks up and overhears a static-ridden dialogue between wife and lover. "Just wish . . . could spend the night . . . hungry all right, but not for. . . . " With a cacophony of New York yammer (eavesdropped in bars, offices, streets) threaded throughout, the story runs the danger of being a mere exercise, clever, technically adroit, but lacking soul. Instead, it is devastating. Night after night, the protagonist waits in bed for his wife, a lawyer working overtime on a case (so she says), to arrive home. But even when she does, they never connect. The city speaks to him in an array of untethered voices, like a Ouija board writ large, delivering shards of a narrative in which he has no place, as is also true of his splintering marriage. As befits the era of social media, in which self-advertisement is ubiquitous and image rules, the characters in "The Dinner Party" view their lives as scripts or online profiles in need of constant revision. The protagonist of "The Pilot," an actual writer, albeit for a TV program he's attempting to sell, second-guesses himself at every turn, scratching out one persona, trying on another, forever afflicted by "the pedestrian sorrows of social anxiety." The enemy, he decides, is "thought - looping destructive gnawing thought." Having borrowed, then rejected, his roommate's "bad-ass" jacket as potentially uncool, he decides at last to model himself at a Hollywood party after "Coach" from a popular TV series. He saunters unrecognized among the guests, sporting a ball cap and blue windbreaker, and chewing on a toothpick. Networking is half his job, he has realized. "And what was the better option - going to the party of the year, to which he'd been invited, and networking with actors and executives? Or returning home to Atlanta to die? . . . So what the protocol for air-kissing hello kept shifting on him?" As he flounders in a swimming pool in the wee hours of the party, he's planning once again, though perhaps belatedly, to change his life. It would be tragic if it weren't so funny, and vice versa. That same interplay between buffoonery and pathos animates "More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?)," an apparent precursor to or outtake from "Then We Came to the End," Ferris's extraordinary first novel. The title character, who works in advertising in Chicago, spends the night at the office, leaving confessions of love on the voice mail of a co-worker who is married and pregnant. He spies through borrowed binoculars on workers in high-rises across the way, does some redecorating of offices down the hall, steals cigarettes and lies down on the floor for a smoke and a nap, only to be discovered by the cleaning lady, the two of them sharing "in the recognition of catching and being caught doing something human." This is a Marxist critique of late capitalism, as in Groucho Marxist. Like "Then We Came to the End," an exhilarating depiction of cubicle culture, "More Abandon" succeeds not just because of its deeply informed sendup of white-collar workday rituals, but also because of its warmth toward the very same. One detects in Ferris, a former ad copywriter, a freelancer's unanticipated nostalgia for the communalism of gossip by the copy machine and desultory Nerf ball tossing. The final story, "A Fair Price," features yet another self-involved, largely clueless dolt, but this guy lacks even the minor charms of his neurotic predecessors. No other story in "The Dinner Party" ends so violently. Jack hires Mike, an apparently down-and-out day laborer, for 20 bucks an hour, to help empty out a storage unit. He tries to engage his hired hand in inane and unreciprocated chitchat, and has gone so far as to bring him a croissant from Le Perche, a fancy French bakery, which he can't decide whether to give him. "What are we here for?" Jack asks Mike. "Is it just to move things? Or do we have some greater purpose?" In response to his boss's attempts at rapport, Mike grunts and says things like "huh?" and "what?" Jack's resentment builds; he can't stand it whenever Mike takes a break to talk or text on his phone. Jack suffers from a kind of class insecurity as experienced by an employer who fears he is being condescended to by his employee. When Jack's paranoia finally escapes his lips in a mad outpouring similar to the guilt-ridden narrator's of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," he beats his hired hand to a pulp. It's a cringe-worthy spectacle of the sort that occurs when a solipsist free-floating through the universe collides with an actual human being. 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 jaded couples in these tales breathe in squalid proximity 'the stale tenement air of married life.' WILL BLYTHE is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever" and the editor of "Why I Write."