Elizabeth Day’s novel, The Party, a critical look at male friendship, envy, jealousy and class differences, begins with the police interrogation of author and journalist Martin Gilmour. Gilmour and his wife Lucy were invited to attend the 40th birthday of Ben Fitzmaurice. The party takes place at the Fitzmaurices’ (golden boy Ben, and his elegant wife, Serena) second, country home, a renovated 17th century monastery (the monks have been thrown out). As with all things Fitzmaurice, the party is completely overboard with lavish, wonderfully described amounts of drink and food. All the important people are there but Martin, who has known Ben since boarding school, is disgruntled at not being invited as an overnight guest to Ben’s home, and instead, he and Lucy are lodged in a rather shabby, uncomfortable hotel, with Martin bitter in the knowledge that his friendship with Ben is slipping.
The rich do parties better than the rest of us. It’s not just the money or the every catered-for whim or the superior quality of the alcohol and food. It’s a certain unquantifiable atmosphere that comes from other people’s excitement. We are turned on by wealth, us lesser mortals. We don’t want to be and yet we are.
We are jealous, yes. Internally, we decry the excessive, absurd, narcissistic scale of a party like Ben Fitzmaurice’s fortieth. But other people’s money has a narcotic quality. It makes you high. It makes you forget your misgivings. You feel privileged, somehow exceptional to have been invited, as though the tiniest fleck of gold leaf from a giant glittering statue has smudged off on you and you can kid yourself you belong. That you are, for a single night, indubitably, One of Them.
The novel goes back and forth in time, switching between Martin and Lucy, who as it turns out, sometime after the party is now staying at some sort of psychiatric centre. While what happened at the party seems to bear crucial weight on the present, in truth, what happened between Ben and Martin decades earlier lies at the heart of this story.
The Party explores the corrosive taint proximity of the filthy rich can have on a middle-class lad. Martin’s envy of Ben reaches pathological levels as he seeks to become invited into Ben’s inner circle. And yet, even though Martin achieves admission to Ben’s coterie, he’s never quite good enough, never quite makes the grade.
The novel’s premise, unfortunately, isn’t new, and while Martin is described “as if his surface changed colour to melt into the environment, A chameleon,” neither he, nor Ben are terribly interesting characters. Serena is one of those pencil-thin, aloof bitchy women, and I would have liked to have seen more of her. Arguably the most interesting character here is Lucy, whose marriage to Martin is deeply rooted in denial, even as she valiantly tries to counterbalance Martin’s toxic need to ‘belong.’ Martin describes her as “my pliant, adoring little wife,” rather as one might describe a pet dog, and yet Martin fails to see that while he finds Lucy useful and tolerates her (trotting along at his heels ready to defend him at every turn) his relationship with Ben mirrors his relationship with Lucy. Whereas Martin is lured into Ben’s orbit by a desire to belong (and something else I can’t mention), Lucy is lured to Martin by his “unavailability.” Lucy is much more complicated than she’s given credit for; the Fitzmaurices and Martin underestimate her capacity for love, sacrifice and devotion. While the Fitzmaurices soar on social status and the flow of money, things coveted by Martin, Lucy rises above these obsessions and comes across as genuine, rare, yet sadly undervalued by all.
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His Futile Preoccupations ..... 
The name Elizabeth Day sounds familiar but I can’t remember any names if her other novels. The premise is interesting, even though it has been done before, but it doesn’t sound as if it was original enough.
Lucy is the one who can’t be easily explained here.
I was about to say something similar to Caroline’s second point. It sounds as if the characterisation could have been stronger or more compelling?
Her name is familiar to me too, only because I happened to catch her on an old episode of the Backlisted podcast where they were discussing Rosamond Lehmann. She was there to champion one of Lehmann’s books – The Weather in the Streets, if my memory serves me correctly.
Yes, at least in my opinion. Martin is one of those hollow men, so there’s not a lot there to lean on.
I looked her up because this sounded interesting. “Brimming with betrayal, corruption and dishonesty” they say of this book.
Ben does something to piss off Martin, and I didn’t quite buy it as Ben has more or less managed to shake Martin off–which makes sense as Ben and his Mrs have 4 kids and a second home, so plenty of excuses there.
Yes there’s betrayal–mostly of the ‘self’. Lots of dishonesty and corruption. I found the Lucy story lines and her relationship with Martin intriguing–more so than the main plotline, but that’s just my opinion.