A Curious Invitation

May 20, 2013
With panache, attention to arresting details, and a flair for mixing literary classics with pop-culture hits, prominent London event planner Field invites readers to 40 fictional parties, including those portrayed in Plato’s Symposium, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. One of the most delightful? The Onion Cellar from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, where patrons chop raw onions into tiny pieces while pouring out their hearts to each other in weepy camaraderie, the inspiration for Field’s own popular event, Evenings of Exquisite Misery. Eccentric and witty, Field bypasses the obvious while favoring the frequently overlooked. In lieu of the Mad Tea Party, Fields treats us to Queen Alice’s Feast (from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), where eating a dish once it has introduced itself to you constitutes a grievous breach of etiquette. Field’s tone is one of breezy erudition. The conversation at the Pooh party (in Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne) is “Beckettian,” while Gravity’s Rainbow has “a reputation for being dense and difficult to understand, but it’s really just a picaresque romp.” Occasionally, Field’s irreverent asides seem merely facetious (“One can only hope that Hollywood Dogs is in the pipeline,” she writes of the spin-offs from Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives). Fortunately, she quotes lavishly from her sources to splendid effect. Agent: Ivan Mulcahy, Mulcahy Conway Associates.

August 1, 2013
Events promoter Field summarizes soirees that only happen between the covers of a book--or when her Last Tuesday Society reproduces them in London. Though it begins with Trimalchio's first-century frolic from The Satyricon and closes with an excessive 2008 feast featuring endangered species from DBC Pierre's Lights Out in Wonderland, Field's scattershot collection doesn't otherwise progress in chronological order--or any other discernible kind of order. The final few get-togethers are fairly apocalyptic: The high school prom turns bloody in Carrie; partygoers eat the dead guest of honor in Finnegan's Wake; and Randle McMurphy's shindig in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest results in a lobotomy for the host, though Pierre's hero/caterer does have second thoughts about serving up a 100-year-old Galapagos tortoise in the final entry. Fielddoes have a format for presenting the individual parties, from The Invitation through The Guest List to The Outcome and The Legacy, but it's mostly an excuse to make reasonably amusing wisecracks about how English writers never describe the food and condescending takedowns of writers more talented than she is. Granted, it's hard not to giggle when Field opines that if Frodo had known that the gift he got at Uncle Bilbo's Eleventy-First Birthday Party was the Ring of Doom, he could have saved himself "all the aggro and bother it would cause him over the next thousand pages or so." Unfortunately, too much of the humor is on the level of this: "Plato is perhaps best remembered these days in the term 'platonic love, ' but, as we see...he didn't rule out a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the path to enlightenment." Still, Field's once-over-lightly approach will probably please undemanding folks looking for a few laughs while they obtain simple takeaways on books they'll never read: The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity's Rainbow and The Prose Edda are among the more daunting works digested, though Hollywood Wives adds a bit of trashy fluff. Like the chatter at a cocktail party: fun but forgettable.

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