Please, sir, can I have some more?: The importance of food in fiction

Many moons ago, in the year 2014, I worked freelance shifts writing articles for the Irish Times Books website. They ranged from diary listings of literary events to books features and author interviews, to mildly diverting, and sometimes ridiculous, clickbait Top 10s. A quick search of my folders from this time includes, in no particular order: Top 10 Lovers in Fiction; Top 10 Southern Gothic Novels; Top 10 Beckett Quotes; and the largely inexplicable Top 10 Animal Quotes. There was Jesus in fiction, mothers in fiction, Scottish fiction, Paddy’s Day fiction. In short: no date in the calendar that couldn’t be turned into a books-related listicle.

The reason I was trawling through the folders of the past, where all writerly dreams and aspirations go to die, was to check whether I’d ever written a Top 10 meals in fiction piece. The plan was to then write a more considered piece on the same topic to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of my novel Dinner Party.

Surprisingly, at least for me, no such piece was written (though sadly the same cannot be said about a listicle of literary quotes to whet the appetite). It surprised me because it seems such an obvious and universal subject in fiction, which is to say, perfect fodder for a Top 10. Hard to think of a novel, in the realist tradition at least, that doesn’t include a meal or a mention of food. Books are about real people, and real people eat – or they’re supposed to. As the critic John Mullen notes in his book How Novels Work, “A meal is never just food. Novelists have long known what anthropologists discovered relatively recently: social eating means something.”

Meals are a big part of Dinner Party. In each of the six sections, which range from ‘90s Carlow, to Trinity College in the noughties, to contemporary Dublin, a meal of some sort takes place. A giddy afternoon tea. A booze-fuelled night at The Merrion. A painstakingly prepared three-course meal for family members – the dinner party of the title.

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Except it’s not really a party. After the guests leave, the book’s protagonist, Kate Gleeson, begins to reveal the tensions that have been simmering under the surface all night. From that point on, Dinner Party looks at how and why the Gleeson family unravelled. There is trauma, loss, eating disorders, family rifts, mental illness, and a formidable Irish mother at the centre of proceedings who provides much of the drama and a few laughs along the way.

Food in fiction is social, cultural, political, and above all for my novel, it is familial. Chez Gleeson, food is the ultimate signifier. At times it brings various family members together. Elsewhere, it is a source of estrangement, rejection, repulsion. Food in fiction, even more so than life, is rarely just about the food.

I wrote the bulk of the first draft of the novel over the course of an MFA in UCD in 2019. The creative element of such programmes accounts for the majority of the grade, but a small amount is allocated for reading and critiquing the work of others. This was both hugely informative and a great relief from the demands of the draft. I read, or re-read, each of the following 10 works over the course of my masters as I was trying to write the novel. As such, they are almost anti-listicle in nature, not popularised, rather a very personal Top 10 of food in fiction. Bon appetit.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) Dickens is a great food writer. Think of the gruel in Oliver Twist – please Sir, can I have some more? – or the paltry meals in David Copperfield, which act as a metaphor for the lack of parental love. But it’s his novella A Christmas Carol that I remember most from childhood: the sense of conviviality and ease at Bob Cratchit’s family dinner compared to Scrooge, alone at his table, with all his fine, inanimate possessions for company.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) A classic of early modernist literature, Hamsun’s Hunger charts the life of a starving, impoverished man in late 19th-century Kristiania (now Oslo). The way the Norwegian author captures the fraying line between reality and delusion helped to inspire parts of my novel: “I had no pain – my hunger had taken the edge off it. In its stead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me, and glad not to be noticed by any one.”

Bliss by Katherine Mansfield (1918) As a portrait of denial, it’s hard to beat Mansfield’s short story Bliss, which takes place over the course of a frenzied afternoon and evening of a dinner party. Hostess Bertha Young is deliriously happy to welcome her guests. From the food, to the company, to the ethereal pear tree in the garden, everything is absolutely perfect, especially when it’s not.

A Cup of Tea, Mary Lavin (1944) One of the most memorable stories I read as a student was Mary Lavin’s A Cup of Tea, as prescribed by another great Irish short story writer, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne. In the story, a female student returns home to smalltown Ireland after some months away in college. The loss of connection between mother and daughter, between old life and new, is ingeniously, nauseatingly shown through a saucepan of boiled milk and the skin forming on top. Katherine Mansfield, who Lavin admired, has a story with the same name.

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Penelope Mortimer (1960) In her only short story collection, Mortimer burrows deep into the everyday moments that can lead to crisis. The superb title story is a case in point: at a supposedly leisurely weekend lunch, the petty resentments and brutality of family life is laid bare. Just before things kick off, matriarch Madge enjoys a moment of respite: “The picture was as clear, as static and lifeless as a Victorian print of domestic bliss. It was her ideal, doggedly worked for. That, she had told herself, the strong, wise, loving father, is William; those devoted, secure, happy children are ours; that beautiful, gentle, capable mother might, with a stretch of the imagination, be me. This is Saturday Lunch with the Brownings.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (1962) From its thrilling opening paragraph to the surreal fairytale ending, Jackson’s novel is a masterpiece of unreliable narration about a family murdered over dinner in their own home. The remaining members – saintly Constance, her disturbed younger sister Merricat and their senile uncle Julian – have nothing to do except hole up from the unfriendly townspeople and “eat the year away”. A creepy, otherworldly book where the ritualisation of food, from sourcing to preparation to consumption, is used to mask the unsavoury past. Just don’t go near the sugar bowl.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler (1982) This is my favourite of Tyler’s novels, a nuanced, perceptive family saga spanning decades of mid-20th century America. It’s the story of a difficult mother, Pearl Tull, and the legacy she hands down to her three very different children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny. The Tulls are a family with so much baggage that they can’t get through a meal without an argument. Comically, this results in ever more meals and get-togethers: “They probably saw more of each other than happy families did. It was almost as if what they couldn’t get right, they had to keep returning to.”

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001) Food runs through Franzen’s novel about a fractured middle-class family from middle America. Middle son Chip is haunted by memories of the joyless dinners of childhood. His sister Denise gets her own back by becoming an chef at a high-end restaurant. There are the shrimp pyramids of suburban dinner parties, mother Enid’s “festive salad” of water chestnuts, peas and cheese cubes in thick mayonnaise, and last but not least, poor eldest son Gary’s slavish adherence to the mixed grill, until he sets one on fire and ends up eating sodden, half-cooked chicken in a daze in front of his family: “He sat with the unchewed bird-flesh in his mouth until he realized that saliva was trickling down his chin–a poor way indeed to demonstrate good mental health.”

The Parting Gift, Claire Keegan (2007) The opening story of Claire Keegan’s second collection Walk the Blue Fields is a tour-de-force. It’s hard to do justice to the intensity of the story in summary, the second person voice that creates such intimacy between character and reader. On the morning a young woman is about to leave her troubled home in rural Ireland for America, one small and desperately late attempt at care is the offer of a boiled egg from her mother.

The Green Road, Anne Enright (2015) A masterclass on the Irish family and the ties that bind. The book follows the lives of four siblings and their aging mother, Rosaleen, across decades and continents. There are a number of meals in the different sections, but the centrepiece is a Christmas dinner in the family home in Clare, where all the adult children have been summoned home by Rosaleen. Tears, tantrums, tensions, and an unforgettable few pages devoted to the big Christmas shop, Enright captures it all with her trademark wit and precision.

Dinner Party is published in paperback by One