ENTERTAINING DISASTERS

A food writer prepares to host a dinner party. Step one: Grouse. Step two: Clear the skeletons out of the closet.

The unnamed heroine of Spiller’s debut novel is a journalist who made her reputation by living a lie—she’s often written about the do’s and don’ts of hosting the perfect dinner party but is terrified of hosting one herself. So when she’s forced to entertain at her Los Angeles home to impress hotshot food-magazine editor Richard Cronenberg, she shifts into panic mode. In the early pages of the book, that means a lot of snarky commentary about the shallowness of Los Angeles, her estranged family and her nearly loveless marriage (she calls her husband “Somebody”), plus chapters that end with recipes whose directions add a dash of irony. What’s initially set up as farce—Murphy’s Law having its way with life—soon takes a severe tonal shift. The book integrates flashbacks to the heroine’s mother, Lenore, whose sad, isolated life as a single mom led to institutionalization, electroshock treatments and the contempt of her extended family. This back story helps explain why the narrator is so high-strung about the dinner party: “I know what happens to women who can’t do their job,” she says. But Spiller never convincingly connects the Type A writer and the dour girl whose schizophrenic mom buried a botched Thanksgiving turkey in the backyard, though the writer tries a few metaphorical feints to sell the idea. (Both suffer wounds in a bathtub, for instance.) Naturally, the dinner plans go off the rails—Cronenberg cancels, Somebody goes on a business trip—but the story remains strangely bifurcated and static, with the narrator’s present self smugly expounding about organic markets while her teenage self wrings her hands over her broken home. Her sister Hunter is something of a mediating influence, both in the narrator’s life and in the novel’s structure, but her role is heavily telegraphed—she’s arriving with a mysterious present that’s regularly referred to but not unpacked until the final pages.

Earnest but undercooked.