Party Fiction

I so wish I had fresh tales of intrigue or hedonism to share with you, friends. The fact is I’ve become a stay-at-home mother to 3 month old kitten. This past month my personal life took something of a battering, so Sonny is partly an emotional-support cat, partly a ploy to engineer myself into taking some responsibility for my life, like, I simply can’t mess around anymore because I have a little mouth to feed. And Sonny has a taste for such delicacies as 100% chicken breast and asparagus in broth. That’s where your pounds are going, paying subscribers…

And I have stopped messing around, I’ve hardly left the house, instead I’m visited like an invalid by friends bearing toy mice and cubes of dried salmon and beer, for us. But I don’t like to be drunk around Sonny, it’s not wholesome. I’m terrified of Christopher Moltisanti-ing my kitten. My instagram reels won’t stop telling me about the startlingly manifold ways a house kitten can accidentally top themselves; it’s clear I will be a highly neurotic mother when the time comes.

August in Tbilisi is anyway a bit of a dead month. The city is emptier; those who can escape to the mountains for cooler air. Some of the clubs close. It’s not a bad moment to have taken my drinking hat off. But I am writing a book, and I have just now reached a chapter which takes place entirely at a party. I’ve been sort of hovering around this chapter, unwilling to begin it, because I want to do it very well. Whoever is reading this, what are your favourite party scenes in books? I’ve done a little re-reading, but there will be so much I have forgotten or never read. I want to write a party scene that takes the best from all of them. There’s an essay in The Paris Review called On Party Fiction that lists a few common denominators. The author references Madame Bovary, Gossip Girl, House of Mirth, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and A Handful of Dust. She’s got a nice line: “If all parties resemble other parties, the way all party people resemble other party people, then all parties are intertextual, they reference each other.” Her common denominators include:

• wealth porn

• the establishment & reinforcement of social hierarchies

• the collective gaze

• the pretension & superciliousness of introverts (to comic effect)

• “impaired time”

• “a watery quality”

• conversational non sequiturs/snippets

I returned to the ball scene in Madame Bovary, where Emma and her bumpkin doctor of a husband, Charles, attend a big party in a chateau, a party so good and so glamorous it “rips a hole in Emma’s life”. It’s basically a big sumptuous list, this scene. What’s on the walls, what’s on the tables, what’s on the women. The party is given this disturbing sense of continuity through the figure of an old man ‘with a napkin tied around his neck like a child’. This is the Duke de Lavadière, who back in the day, we’re told, had partied with the best of them. He was even a lover of Marie Antoinette. “He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family.” As the next generation let loose all around him, he sits there, dribbling gravy, as if he was born in the middle of a party and will die in the middle of party. Emma looks to the windows and sees peasants pressing their faces against the glass, watching them. The musicians pause to “cool the tips of their fingers on their tongues”. I wince for poor Charles. Emma forbids him to dance, she says he’ll embarrass himself, and by the end of the party: “he had spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables, watching them play whist, without understanding anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that he pulled off his boots.”

Satan’s Ball in The Master and Margarita must have been soooooo fun to write. I’m sticking more or less to the real world in my book, so I can’t allow my protagonist to be ceremonially bathed in blood by the devil’s coterie, nor can I describe “champagne seething in three pools,” nor a legion of sparkly naked women swimming in those pools, nor the guests arriving fully decomposed through the fireplace to transform into well turned-out gentlemen with dubious personal histories. Even so, all party scenes have an element of unreality to them, if they’re meant to be good parties. Excess that becomes almost hallucinatory in a delimited space, a skewed sense of time, the surreality of partially-heard and misunderstood conversations, loud music, the fever dream quality to seeing loads of people you know in one room… A good party means a temporary abdication of real life and responsibility. Performativity is encouraged. Irrationality is encouraged. Every real party is kind of a masked party.

So yeah, comment your favourite fictional parties, please reader. Writing this has made me want to get very drunk.

Peace xxxxxx