The Dinner Party, Viola van de Sandt's propulsive debut, is structured around one fraught dinner party and the far-reaching ramifications it has on Franca's life after a somewhat unwilling stint as its hostess. Franca's account of the doomed evening begins as a collection of facts in an unsent letter she is writing at the behest of her therapist. Her report of the meal is carefully organized, starting with prep and mise en place and continuing right up to the sickly sweet spill of chocolate frosting at dessert. But amid that careful organization is lurking "that business with the knife," the alluded-to denouement of the evening that launches Franca out of her constructed life and into something for which she has no menu, no plan, no recipe--something that, if she can only get there, might feel begin to feel like freedom.
Van de Sandt moves expertly through time in The Dinner Party, weaving together past and present to great effect. The intimate dinner party, thrown at the insistence of Franca's partner, is meant to celebrate a successful investment in his portfolio--and represent the role Franca plays as a dutiful housewife-to-be. With her therapist's support, Franca fills in some of the blanks of her memory around the event and the ways those lost memories and forgotten traumas hide within a person: her father's early death and her mother's year-long silence afterward.
With sharp prose and emotional clarity, The Dinner Party is the tale of one woman coming to know about herself and about life, a breathtaking, fast-paced tale of a woman's hurt and rage and anger and despair and becoming. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer