Summary
Summary
A taut psychological tale of obsession and betrayal set over the course of a dinner party.
"Day's shrewd eye and authorial tone provide a gleeful, edgy wit.... [a] smart, irresistible romp."- New York Times Book Review
Ben, who hails from old money, and Martin, who grew up poor but is slowly carving out a successful career as an art critic, have been inseparable since childhood. Ben's wife Serena likes to jokingly refer to Martin as Ben's dutiful Little Shadow.
Lucy is a devoted wife to Martin, even as she knows she'll always be second best to his sacred friendship. When Ben throws a lavish 40th birthday party as his new palatial country home, Martin and Lucy attend, mixing with the very upper echelons of London society.
But why, the next morning, is Martin in a police station being interviewed about the events of last night? Why is Lucy being forced to answer questions about his husband and his past? What exactly happened at the party? And what has bound these two very different men together for so many years?
A cleverly built tour of intrigue, The Party reads like a novelistic board game of Clue, taking us through the various half-truths and lies its characters weave, as the past and present collide in a way that its protagonists could never have anticipated.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fans of Herman Koch's The Dinner will be tempted to check out Day's fourth novel-both follow two couples with simmering emotional histories as they spend an upscale evening together, during which old resentments are revealed and something tragic occurs-but in this novel, the plot plays out predictably and is beset by obvious foreshadowing. Ben Fitzmaurice and Martin Gilmour, Londoners on the cusp of middle age, have been best friends since they met at public school in 1989, despite the fact that the former comes from a wealthy, titled background and the latter a hand-me-down existence. Ben and his beautiful wife, Serena, hold a party to celebrate their new home, Tipworth Priory, a former monastery. Martin and his more modest partner, Lucy, are invited. Now a successful art critic, Martin has never gotten over the meanness of his youth and rubs shoulders uneasily at the party with Ben's posh guests, including the new prime minister. At the end of the evening, Ben and Serena ask to speak to Martin and Lucy in private, and that's when things get out of hand. Ultimately, this is a hollow diatribe against the rich and entitled. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A terrible event at a 40th birthday celebration becomes the focus for a dark tale of lifelong obsession and jealousy T he Party is a novelistic study in every kind of anxiety. Class anxiety, status anxiety, sexual anxiety, social anxiety, pregnancy anxiety, fashion anxiety, even footwear anxiety. I felt anxious reading it -- anxious for the characters, anxious for the author, anxious for myself. I feel anxious reviewing it. The cover of the proof copy asks: "Are you invited?" Anxiously, I now pass that question on to you. Elizabeth Day's first novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, won a Betty Trask award. This is her fourth and the press release offers comparisons to Patricia Highsmith 's The Talented Mr Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst' s The Line of Beauty. And, indeed, it is very close -- in terms of subject matter and setup -- to the latter. Martin Gilmour is an emotionally cauterised boy whose father died when he was young. He develops the tastes and demeanour of an aesthete and goes on to write a successful book, Art: Who Gives a F**k? At boarding school, he forms a crypto-homosexual attachment to Ben Fitzmaurice, the effortlessly charming son of a wealthy aristocratic family; they become "best friends". Martin gradually inveigles his way into the Fitzmaurice home as a proxy for Ben's dead brother. The relationship is formalised when Martin takes the rap for Ben following a serious accident while they are at Cambridge University. Martin marries Lucy and husband and wife tell the story in alternating first-person narratives. The novel is framed by Martin's interview in a police station following some unknown-but-terrible event at Ben's lavish 40th birthday bash, the eponymous party. This is a dark and compelling book of lifelong obsessions, jealousies and neuroses; of acute psychological complaint, of dissatisfactions, of isolation, loneliness and solipsistic rage. As Martin says, his "mother's obsessive love coexisted with contempt for her own vulnerability"; for much of his childhood she had been "unhappy or resentful or angry". And the novel enacts this rancorous legacy as it tortures its protagonists and paints itself in red, black and envious green on the canvas of the world it envisions. I am anxious, though, that something of this contempt spills over and starts to marinate the prose to its own detriment; certainly, the narrators' constantly withering assessments of other characters threaten to swamp the reading experience. At the party, for example, characters comes on for little dramatic purpose other than to be subjected to narrative scorn. A TV presenter's face is "haggard and old". The wife of an adversary is "the snub-nose type who doesn't age well, whose freckles turn into liver spots and whose youthful, lithe flat-chestedness becomes bony and weathered as the years pass". Jennifer, a minor character, is "mildly despised" at Martin's junior school; the narrator then despises her mightily for having "a pitifully small number of online friends". Another secondary character, Vicky, is given three hopeful words -- "I liked Vicky" -- but straight away Martin tells us "I was surprised by that" and the rest of the paragraph is immediately engulfed with counterexamples of people he "couldn't bear". The admirable energy (and anger) of the writing too often curdles into sneering and this, in turn, creates a constrictive claustrophobia that stops the book reaching for something more resonant -- about unrequited gay male love, perhaps, or undead marriages, or even human monstrosity. I sometimes had the sense of the prose asphyxiating itself. Sure, people are awful, but "nothing is simply one thing", as Virginia Woolf has it, not even the bad guys. And if so, why dramatise them? In The Line of Beauty, the other dimensions of the human experience are also present: love, lust, jealousy and obsession modulate through different keys. Here, there seems to be so little humour, fun or pleasure, even in desire. Day has a tendency to deploy off-the-shelf phrases -- people "pore" over "bookcases"; "memory" comes "unbidden"; teachers "roamed the corridors"; Gilly has a "beady stare"; cab drivers say "around these parts". When Martin reaches for an illustrative idea about how people "fail to discern" the "real value" of things "until it's far too late", he invites us to think about how people "knock over priceless Ming vases in museums with their oversize backpacks". But this feels wrong: not true, not really germane or illustrative of his point and too trite an objet d'art for such a character to deploy. Conversely, Day's action writing is superb. The killing of a bird, the gay oral sex, the crash, the skilful execution of the final big scene -- in these passages, the writing becomes purposeful, inclusive, finely cadenced. The narratorial eczema clears up, the captious voices drop away, and instead we're deep in the truth of each moment: "Air pushed back into my lungs. Vicky's head snapped and lolled, hair falling. Ben in shadow. Wetness on my chin. I reached up, removed my hand, saw it was blood." All in all, I left this book wanting to read more of Day's other work. - Edward Docx.
Kirkus Review
Tempers flare and loyalties fray when old friends gather for a lavish bash in the English countryside.A police interrogation provides the frame for this literary suspense novel from British author Day (Paradise City, 2015, etc.). Three weeks prior to Martin Gilmour's summons by the Tipworth PD, Britain's best and brightest gathered at charismatic power couple Ben and Serena Fitzmaurice's new vacation homea former monasteryto celebrate Ben's 40th birthday. Also in attendance were misanthropic journalist Martin and his dowdy wife, Lucy, as Martin and Ben have been practically inseparable since boarding school. The question of what happened that night to attract the attention of the authorities is the skeleton on which Day's plot hangs, but the book's true mystery concerns the bond that links these two seemingly incompatible men. Martin is a spellbinding storyteller who doles out details like they're a controlled substance. He pauses frequently to reflect upon his complicated history with Ben and the unhappy childhood that preceded it, and his narration is littered with keen yet cutting observations about people, their relationships, and society at large. Excerpts from Lucy's journal fill the gaps and provide additional insight regarding her husband, their marriage, and the Fitzmaurices. Vividly sketched characters and evocative prose further distinguish the story, which ends on a note that both shocks and gratifies. Day's latest is a dark, haunting, and elegantly crafted tale of obsession, desperation, devastation, and rebirth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Day's (Paradise City, 2015) latest is a character-driven study of a friendship and a marriage framed by a criminal investigation. The book opens with Martin being questioned by the police about an incident at a party weeks earlier. The party was thrown by Martin's best friend, Ben, and his elegant wife, Serena, and included friends, celebrities, and even an appearance by the prime minister. Flashbacks, to that night and to Martin and Ben's days at an elite boarding school, create a picture of their friendship and of Martin's strained and codependent marriage to Lucy, whose perspective is written through journal entries. Escaping his life of poverty by first winning a scholarship and then by ingratiating himself into Ben's wealthy family, Martin maintains the relationship through manipulation and deceit. Day's characters are complex and dark, and her exploration of the intersection of money, privilege, and power is timely without being preachy. Reading this effective mash-up of suspense and prep-school novel with deliberate and tantalizing reveals is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ELIZABETH DAY'S sly fourth novel is an enticing mix of social climbing, barely hidden lust and possible crimes. The story rests on two central questions: Why is Martin Gilmour, a minor success as an art critic, being interrogated at a police station in the Cotswolds? What happened at the lavish 40 th-birthday party of his aristocratic best friend, Ben Fitzmaurice, to make Martin squirm under the detectives' glare? The novel's underpinnings are much richer. Building on generations of fiction dissecting the British class system, Day carries that theme into the 21st century, adding the swift pace of a psychological thriller. Martin is the novel's main narrator, giving us his account from the police station. He weaves in flashbacks to the party several weeks before, attended by celebrity chefs, supermodels, even the prime minister. And he recalls his long friendship with Ben, from school days through Cambridge and beyond, with Martin the scholarship boy who idolizes Ben and becomes almost a member of the Fitzmaurice family. Details that at first seem too obvious are soon exposed as symptoms of just how unreliable a narrator Martin is. He doesn't take offense at his nickname, LS, as in Ben's "little shadow." He says that his meek wife, Lucy, "would never understand ... the bond between two men," but she catches on soon enough that "he was in love with his best friend." Only Martin believes that his love is a closeted secret. Interspersed with his narrative are sections from a diary written by Lucy in the weeks after the party. As in her previous novels (including "Paradise City"), Day puts fragmented chronology and alternating points of view to good use, drawing readers in and prodding us to piece together the mosaic. Lucy's eyewitness account of the party often gives way to memories of her life with Martin. The couple are a perfect match of insecurities. His make him self-deluded; hers make her a needy caregiver. We glean that the glorified Ben is more of a cipher than Martin can bear to admit. Mysteries are teased and gradually, gracefully resolved. Lucy notices that Martin's bookish glasses aren't prescription, but doesn't let on. He recalls that his own mother once said, "You've always been a wrong 'un." Is he dangerous or just pretentious? "The Party" knowingly nods toward "Brideshead Revisited" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley." But Day refreshes their themes for an age in which the upper echelons retain their allure and their grasp on power while posing as common folk. The fictional prime minister is an old family friend named Edward. As he rose in politics, he "started asking everyone to call him Ed in the vain hope that everyone would forget about his Etonian background." Martin is enamored of the Fitzmaurices, yet as a guest in their grand house notices a cheapness he associates with old money, including small bottles of shampoo pilfered from hotels. Such droll observations seem to reflect on Day, a former feature writer for newspapers, more than on her characters. It is the author who has given Ben's sister the witheringly perfect posh name Fliss. But Day's shrewd eye and authorial tone also provide a gleeful, edgy wit. The novel is eventually overloaded with literary allusions. Among them, Lucy evokes "The Great Gatsby," complaining that the Fitzmaurices (halfway to Fitzgerald, after all) were "wealthy, privileged, beautiful" people, "careless with the rest of us." The echoes of other novels become so plentiful that "The Party" isn't as original or ambitious as it might have been. That doesn't diminish the fun of reading this smart, irresistible romp. CARYN JAMES is a film critic for BBC Culture and the author of the novels "Glorie" and "What Caroline Knew."