Reading Hunger

The heroines populating Diane Goodman's latest short story collection, Party Girls, are always casting a glance at the other invitees, measuring their own happiness against anyone else passing through their peripheries. "I am certain that even though Aiko and I are eating the same sandwich, hers tastes so much better than my own," writes the narrator of the opening story, "Beloved Child," a complicated multi-friend relationship story about taking stock of one's station in life against—in this case—your roommates. The women in these stories prepare food for one another and pay close attention to how these meals affect those who consume them. Sometimes just overhearing another woman having a cell phone conversation outside the door of your apartment can be the occasion for reevaluating your entire life, as in the twin stories "Saving Julie" and "Saving Herself."

Food can be a comfort, but it can also be the tool of aggression. Renaissance royalty held elaborate food pageants lasting dozens of courses over many days. Documents from the period show these feasts were not just for pleasure, but also to intimidate neighboring polities into submission through the breadth and opulence of the dinning table. This is a strategy familiar to many of Goodman's characters, most notably Candice, the aging bank officer in "CandyLand" who prepares an exquisitely ornamented meal for a St. Patrick's Day party for her co-workers the day after she has been fired, using it to exact a fierce revenge, forcing her boss (her ex-boss now) and his wife to eat, though they are full. The same holds for Veronica, the needy protagonist of "The Hungry Girl." Previously scorned by a chef and mentor for a prettier, younger girl (the bane of many of Goodman's characters), Veronica has come back to humiliate this man over the course of an expensive hotel dinner. If revenge is a dish best served cold, Goodman shows us it can be pretty good over lobster and passion fruit soufflé too.

"No matter what anyone says, that's the hardest thing about growing old. Not feeling old. Not believing it. Looking into the mirror and wondering who is looking back." That's Lucy's observation. She's the protagonist of the story "Dancing" who learns that cooking for a man doesn't always mean that same someone is going to remain loyal to you. Many of these quiet observations are about the way food is so interpersonal and political, as is the case for Sloane in "The Secret World of Women." Sloane, who is middle aged and about had it with everyone, only decides to go to a party later that evening—not just because she's made food for it—but because that food consists of appetizers and doesn't want to throw it out. "[N]o one eats appetizers they make for a party they don't go to."

My only complaint about this literary buffet is that one shouldn't read it hungry. The description of the carefully prepared dishes will leave the reader hungry, just as the internal dramas of the heroines leave one on edge. While all the stories ping with recognizable anxieties, my favorite of these epicurean morality tales is "The Other Mothers." In this, the final story of the collection, the narrator, Mallory, the beleaguered wife of an airline pilot, has just found herself uprooted from her Midwestern lifestyle and been plunked down onto a tony island of multi-national trophy wives and billionaire husbands

Detail from cover

who drive around the island in golf carts, sharing with one another cases of wine from family vineyards. In an effort to ingratiate herself with her new neighbors, Mallory makes a cookout, pure Midwest all the way, with brats and Cheetos and homemade cookies. Like all of Goodman's stories, the menus are impeccably detailed right down to the potato salad, "garnished with hard-boiled egg slices and paprika." Unfortunately, the effort is for naught, as Mallory's snooty neighbors arrive...