The Dinner Party Stories

3.75. Disturbing yet ordinary stories of people too inside their own heads to be healthy. Ferris has a great ear for dialogue and is able to imbue it with nuance and subtext. In one of my favorites, a sliding-doors type story examines the words, gestures or mere eye rolls that, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can create chaos in a relationship.

As my first experience with Joshua Ferris, this concise, punchy collection of modern short stories was a solid introduction to his work, and I greatly enjoyed it – but for one major recurring quality. Ferris sure can spin a tale, which conjures a whiff of Armistead Maupin in a bigger city context, with less sanguine charm and far more morose grit. His prose is fantastic and the pacing of each piece is nearly flawless. He is imaginative, emotive, and varied in his enveloping vignettes of emotional damage bubbling up to the surface of the everyman. And by "everyman," I mean exactly that. Across the board, Ferris' stories are centered on both the deep and shallow flaws within compromised males that are missing significant chunks of their emotional stability. Whether these chunks were never imparted or whether they were once present and spirited away by loss, complacency, or neglect is not clear. What is most shocking about this theme is that it very well could describe the majority of actual American male relationships with others and with themselves. These are stark chronicles of loneliness, compromise, wistfulness, and insecurity, and they are probably more realistic than we are comfortable in acknowledging. This brutal exploration of humanity is not the quality by which I am bothered, however. In fact, it's arguably Ferris' strongest facet. Rather than ending each story with any kind of satisfaction or semblance of closure to diffuse the relentless tension, Ferris deliberately takes advantage of the "negative space" in the unsaid words after the cliffhanger final paragraphs to let the reader come up with their own closure – or, more likely, to linger upon the uncomfortable silence left behind when the storyteller abruptly ceases the tale. While I realize that this is a literary technique used for pointed effect, it becomes something of a tedious signature; after eleven stories in a row, it tends to come off like a teasing pretension. As a result, as I grew familiar with Ferris' style, I also grew trepidatious about coming to the jarring end of another one of his short stories in The Dinner Party. This is disappointing only because I want him to continue ad infinitum, so engrossing are the yarns. I suppose this renders his mission accomplished, and for that he cannot be too harshly faulted. All in all, Ferris is a powerful writer who appears able to have a go at any genre. He is a truth-teller and is not afraid of confrontation or pain – or about handing it out. That discomfort might not appeal to every reader, but I sure appreciate his contribution to artfully exposing our flaws, faults, and foibles in a dream-hazy yet sobering manner. Favorites from the collection include More Abandon, Life in the Heart of the Dead, and A Fair Price – though any and all are worth your time and attention. I'm very much looking forward to more of Joshua Ferris' short stories, negative space and all.