SEASON'S READINGS: STRANGERS AT THE FEAST

2010 Hardcover Edition 

Thanksgiving really does generate the least media of the Big Three holidays.  There are a fair amount of Thanksgiving-themed TV episodes but only a handful of movies, books and specials, especially in comparison to the seemingly endless amount of Halloween and Christmas content.  This year I went on the hunt for Thanksgiving reading material outside of picture books and cozy mysteries.  I was excited to stumble across Jennifer Vanderbes' Strangers at the Feast, a novel that takes place entirely on Thanksgiving Day.  The cover copy made it sound like your typical, pseudo-literary dysfunctional Connecticut family story but it ultimately had a bit more going for it than the jacket suggested.

The book (Vanderbes' sophomore effort) follows the course of one Thanksgiving Day as the upper-middle class Olson family gathers together for the holiday.  The characters are interesting, if not a bit predictable.  There's the unmarried, freewheeling professor daughter taking a stab at adult responsibility by both adopting a mute girl from India and hosting Thanksgiving for the first time.  We  also have a money-hungry brother, his resentful wife and their three kids, with the whole family teetering on financial ruin despite their lavish lifestyle.  And finally there are the parents the slightly helpless homemaker wife and mother and the remote, Vietnam vet father.

The novel is well-written and contains a lot of details that root it in the real world, something I always appreciate.  The characters are realistic; my favorite was Denise, the angry wife and daughter-in-law who never the less keeps up appearances.  Most of the book, told in chapters alternating between the various characters' perspectives, is made up of flashbacks exploring the histories of the various characters before cutting back to their present-day interactions during Thanksgiving.  If that's all this book had to offer it would have been a major and cliched disappointment.  The whole dysfunctional WASP family thing, even when done well, has been done to death.  Luckily there was a suspense element that made it a more enjoyable, if imperfect read.

2011 Paperback Edition

Along with the Olson family there's one more key character: Kijo, an African-American teen from a housing project in Stamford.  From the epilogue on we get cryptic hints that some sort of violent tragedy befalls the Olsons on Thanksgiving; obviously it involves Kijo, as he heads out early in story to enact mysterious revenge against at least one member of the family.  The suspense element of how exactly this is all going to play out is intriguing, but my biggest complaint about the book is that the big, built-up event doesn't happen until the last 40 pages or so of the book.  It's like writing a 350 page novel about the Titanic and not having the boat hit the iceberg until page 300.  I don't suffer from bloodlust or anything but again, it's this element of violence that makes this book something a bit more than your average neurotic family story and the payoff, while pretty satisfying, comes way too late in the game.

I do also have to give a shout-out to the author's cringe-worthy child dialogue.  Creating realistic-sounding children in novels is a very difficult task; I almost take for granted when a child speaks in a book that it will sound terrible.  Luckily the kids don't play a big role in the story (at least one of them is mute) but the little dialogue they have is pretty bad, even by my low standards.  The best-worst example comes while two of the twins are playing explorer and have this to say about their grandmother: "The Westportians are known as a peaceful people.  They are gardeners and stargazers and drinkers of wine."  Oh yeah, that's exactly the sort of insightful, slightly biting critique that rolled off my tongue at age 9.  There is an element of literary pretension at work here, as also evidenced by the author's painfully earnest, oh-so-serious jacket photo.


Pacing issues and these small quibbles aside, this was a quick and entertaining read and certainly satisfied my hunger from some Thanksgiving fiction.  The holiday makes for a great backdrop and you get a lot of scenes of preparing the meal, eating the meal, debates about watching football and family woes in the context of holiday togetherness.  If you're looking for not just a good Thanksgiving read but a pretty good book in of itself, join Strangers at the Feast.