“The Stale Tenement Air of Married Life”

Great opening paragraphs in this review of Joshua Ferris’s story collection:

It is late on a spring afternoon in Brooklyn. Sarah sits on her balcony, sipping a glass of wine, gazing down at the neighbors laughing on their brownstone stoops. A mystical sort of breeze arrives, one of “maybe a dozen in a lifetime,” tickling the undersides of leaves and Sarah, too, who now finds herself restless with longing for something new, for anything but the same old thing. Her husband comes home. “What should we do tonight?” she asks. “I don’t care,” Jay says. “What do you want to do?”

As most battered and seaworthy veterans of relationships eventually know, this is not the best response to a mate who feels herself to be in a sudden existential quandary, who, anointed by a breeze, is looking for something more than just another late-night superhero movie and familiar takeout sandwich. Bad though a spouse may be who dictates the marital laws, equally awful is the passive partner who simply goes along for every ride.

In that vexed, trembling fashion begins “The Breeze,” one of several standout stories in Joshua Ferris’s new collection, “The Dinner Party,” a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion. Richard Yates once published a collection called “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.” With 11 stories of its own, “The Dinner Party” might comparably have been titled “Eleven Kinds of Crazy.” Coupledom, in particular, is shown to be a nearly hallucinatory proposition, involving those alternative realities commonly known as husband and wife, who suffer veiled and separate lives side by side, breathing in squalid proximity “the stale tenement air of married life,” as Ferris puts it.