The Writings of Doug Ingold

The Diners, Stephen Fox’s latest novel, takes us to a Christmas dinner where nine long-time friends gather in an unnamed community in northern California. This is the seventh year the clan has met at the home of Betty Crown, a widow, and a teacher of philosophy. At the beginning, Tom Whelan, a history teacher, is not enthusiastic about yet another Christmas dinner at Betty’s. But he and his wife Sarah, another philosophy teacher, pack up their shrimp dish, grab their bottle of wine and set off. In addition to the Whelans and Betty Crown, there are two other couples and two additional women at the dinner. All the characters are in their seventies or older, and other than a retired medical doctor and his artist wife, the guests are, or were, university teachers. Though they share race, age and education, the diners come from interesting and diverse backgrounds that are revealed as we proceed through the story.

There is an element of jokey tension, particularly among the three men, but basically the novel details the conversation that takes place during the course of the evening. As one might suspect, the banter involves subjects related both to the characters’ professions and their advanced years. One subject, for example, is dementia. We learn that Betty’s late husband, an attorney, suffered from it though no one in the group apparently realized it, and we get an “academic” discussion of the types and causes of the mental decline we call dementia.

Fox employs an interesting approach to fiction. He blends the typical techniques of scene description, action, character development and conversation with factual, historical and political exposition.  Subjects other than dementia, include teaching, baseball history, the environment, racism, service in, and opposition to, the Vietnam war. Before the evening is over, the historian Tom Whelan prophecies a dystopian future for the United States, and in the poignant final chapter we learn how in the year following the dinner, age and circumstance bring great changes to the lives of each of the nine characters. I very much enjoyed the novel, perhaps because I so closely share the age and history of the characters. Anyone who remembers Sal “The Barber” Maglie and the ship Calypso, will enjoy being a guest at Betty Crown’s Christmas party.

Alexandra Fuller has written three memoirs about herself and her family: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness and Leaving Before the Rains Come. Cocktail Hour is the first I have read, though I have also enjoyed her novel, Quiet Until the Thaw.

Cocktail Hour focuses on the author’s extraordinary mother Nicola Fuller, a white woman of Scottish heritage, who grew up in Africa and has lived most all of her life there. Her childhood was in Kenya where she became a skilled, perhaps reckless, horsewoman. At twenty she married Tim Fuller and a series of events led the young family to leave Kenya for a farm in White-ruled Rhodesia. There, the war of independence eventually forced them to again abandon their home. As the memoir comes to its conclusion, the parents, now in their sixties, operate a “fish and banana” farm in Zambia. At one level this is the story of a family swimming resolutely against the tide of history.

Nicola Fuller is revealed as a beautiful, charismatic, courageous woman who aspires to live a very romantic life. She and her husband share a strong attachment to each other, to their children, to the light and the soil of the Africa they know and love. They also share a great fondness for dogs and horses, for alcohol and adventure. As they endure hardships and a series of profound tragedies, including the deaths of three children, Nicola verges at times on the edge of madness and Tim struggles to hold their lives and family together.

Every page of this memoir is a pleasure to read. There are beautiful descriptions, considerable humor, heart-wrenching turns of fate. Most remarkable is the tone Ms. Fuller brings to her story. She obviously loves and admires her parents and appreciates the upbringing they gave her, but she insists on portraying them with a clear-eyed precision that is never maudlin, sugar-coated or romanticized. She leads us through turmoil and loss and delivers us to the farm in Zambia where at book’s end we find her parents at home and at peace.

Kim Thúy is a Vietnamese-born Canadian novelist who writes in French but whose work is available in English translation. The title of the novel, Mãn, is also the name of the story’s female narrator. The name means “perfect fulfillment” and one could interpret the novel as Mãn’s journey to achieve the potential promised by her name. On the opening page we learn that one woman gave her birth, a second found her in a vegetable patch and a third, Maman—”my Maman”—raised her. This happened in Vietnam during the long years of war, and the ferocity and brutality of that war, while never emphasized or dwelled on, informs the story and shapes the features of every Vietnamese character who appears in it.

When Mãn is a young woman, Maman arranges a marriage for her to a Vietnamese man who has a restaurant in Montreal. Mãn’s husband, whose name we never learn, is a decent, hard-working fellow but stiffened by his own experiences in their home country is incapable of genuine affection. Of their marriage, the narrator tells us: “It was enough for him to be happy for all of us to be.”

While working at the restaurant Mãn meets a number of people who enter the story, perform their small roles, and then disappear. Most important of these is Julie, a French-Canadian who with her husband has adopted a Vietnamese child. Julie and Mãn are perfect for each other. Mãn becomes Julie’s daughter’s “Vietnamese mother” while Julie with her resources, her knowledge and energy helps Mãn escape the confines her husband’s restaurant kitchen.

Mãn and Julie develop a catering business. They write a cookbook that becomes a best seller, one that transforms Mãn into a celebrity chef. The author, Kim Thúy has owned a restaurant in Montreal, and she provides us with many delectable descriptions of the preparation, the layout and the taste of Vietnamese cuisine. About halfway through the novel, Mãn is invited to Paris to promote the cookbook, and there she meets Luc, a handsome young French restauranteur who like Mãn is also married and the parent of small children. The poignant, bittersweet, wildly romantic descriptions of their transcontinental relationship take us through to the final page.

While the above paragraphs suggest a chronological narration, the story is not told that way. Set out in brief snatches—the novel contains roughly a hundred chapters and is only 139 pages long—the story proceeds not chronologically but by association. A chapter on how, in the Montreal restaurant, Mãn helps a young Vietnamese dishwasher pass an exam, leads to one about how years earlier Maman taught her to read. A chapter where she marvels at Julie’s ability to openly cry leads to one that begins with her description of how she hides her tears from her husband and then presents this lovely image: “At night when we used to share the same bed, the sound of Maman’s tears sometimes escaped the corners of her closed eyes. I would hold my breath then, because with no witness, sorrow might exist only as a ghost.”

Mãn is like a fine meal that is served to us in delicate bites while we enjoy the lyrical and lively conversation passing back and forth across the table, a conversation that tells us much about the Vietnamese people and their culture.