Strangers at the Feast

A NOVEL

Jennifer Vanderbes

SCRIBNER
New York London Toronto Sydney
l
Scribner
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are products of the authors imagination or are used ctitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Vanderbes
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020.
First Scribner hardcover edition August 2010
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc.,
used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
business@simonandschuster.com.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your
live event. For more information or to book an event contact the
Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or
visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009049756
ISBN 978-1-4391-6695-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-6699-4 (ebook)
 Praise for Strangers at the Feast:

The incomparable Jennifer Vanderbes has done it again. Training her sights on the intimate
workings of a single suburban every-family, she manages to invoke the whole history of a
continent, while simultaneously engaging some of the thorniest questions of our times. This is a
book that dares to ask: What went wrong, and right, in America? Gorgeously written and
uncompromising in its vision, STRANGERS AT THE FEAST is more than a great novel. It's an
important one. Justin Cronin, Author of THE PASSAGE

STRANGERS AT THE FEAST is a novel of collision courses. Here is a neurotic family trying
as best they can to make it through Thanksgiving. Here are a pair of hapless burglars. Here are
husbands and wives, parents and children, whose perspectives place them in different universes.
Jennifer Vanderbes weaves these vectors together with magical, jaw-dropping fluidity. The book
has the mordant, hilarious observations of high comedy, and the compassion of a tragic character
study, and the page-turning suspense of a thriller. I flew through this wonderful novel and I can't
wait to read it again. Dan Chaon, author of AWAIT YOUR REPLY

Vanderbes has written an absorbing and suspenseful story about the dynamics of family,
generational misunderstandings, and the desperate ways one copes with both the arbitrariness of
fate and the consequences of one's choices. Library Journal (starred review)

Jennifer Vanderbes does that rare thing in a novel: she stands back and lets her characters talk.
STRANGERS AT THE FEAST is filled with smart conversation, as well as humor, depth,
sorrow and surprise. This is a big and satisfying book. Meg Wolitzer, author of TEN YEAR
NAP

"Elegant and insightful and delightfully precise...Jennifer Vanderbes' Strangers At The Feast is a
bona-fide delicacy." -John Wray, author of LOWBOY

An inventively plotted, highly readable novel about white Americans overweening sense of
entitlement. Booklist
Prologue
 ELEANOR

hey had been happy people, thought Eleanor.

T When others spoke of what happened to her family, they
shook their heads. But the Olsons were so happy!
Happy, and peaceful.
Eleanor believed she had been a good mother, teaching her chil-
dren not only to say please and thank you, not only to keep in their
elbows while cutting food, but also, when the roast was burned, to
compliment Mrs. Murchison on a magnificently cooked meal. When
they received gifts, her children wrote detailed notes. Dearest grandma,
we had our furst snowfall last thursday, and I wore that eggskwisit blue skarf
you gave me... . Photos were sentDouglas and Ginny squinting in
strategic feverishness at the Monopoly set from her husbands boss,
Jeremiah Reynolds; pink-faced and tangled in their room playing
Twister, a gift from the mournfully barren wife of their longtime
accountant. Because politeness indicated good breeding. And Eleanor
believed that small gestures of considerationa door held open, a
dinner plate clearedcultivated a mind-set of good citizenship.
So, when the time came, her children helped blind men at cross-
walks. They hauled Ms. Hendersons groceries from Safeway to her
clapboard house. Many times, at the end of dinner parties, Douglas, a
mere thirteen, came downstairs to help Pamela Strouse into her thick
mink coat, smiling through her Glenlivet kisses, offering his elbow to
steady her. How courteous your children are! people had always said. How
well you have raised them! When the Westport library burned down, the

1
 2 | J E N N I F E R VA N D E R B E S

children sold lemonade to raise money for the reconstruction. Once,

on her way home from college, Ginny pulled off I-95 to help a woman
with a blown-out tire and nearly got struck by an eighteen-wheeler.
At this Eleanor put her foot down. For the sake of your mothers
heart, she had said, do me the courtesy of staying alive.
Being a parent wasnt easy.
First came the breastfeeding and burping, then frantically inter-
cepting every coin, paper clip, and rusted battery in a ten-block
radius. Horrid images kept you up: fingers and fan blades, foreheads
and marble floors, necks and venetian-blind cords. When your chil-
dren made it safely to grade school, every finger and toe accounted
for, you had to steer them away from the kids who spoke out of turn,
who set tacks on the teachers chair and whiled away afternoons in
detention.
The reward for all this, of course, was the adolescent protest per-
fected over the centuries: the silent treatment.
When you suggested to Douglas that his college girlfriend wasnt
an appropriate guest for a family holiday, he might scowl as you lay the
silver on the Christmas table. Such sights were needles in a mothers
heart. Had you misjudged? Had you gone too far? But you endured
the difficult moments because, in the long run, your children would
be thankful.
Eleanors own mother knew this.
Let him go, she had said when Eleanor fell in love with Howard
Brinkmeyer her senior year of high school. Her mother said his par-
ents would want him to find a nice Jewish girl. He was not going to
marry a blond girl named Eleanor Haggarty; she might as well wait
for John Glenn to invite her to picnic on the moon. She was an exper-
iment for him, a shiksa hors doeuvre to cut his hunger before the
main course. Having married at seventeen, her mother worried that
Eleanor was wasting time. Did Eleanor want to turn out like Alice
Freeman? Or worse, like old Miss Barksdale? Being alonethey had
lost Eleanors father to cirrhosiswas no easy life for a woman. Still
 S T R A N G E R S AT T H E F E A S T | 3

Eleanor sulked for months. By flashlight she read Romeo and Juliet and
soaked her pillow with tears; she cut her hair in a bob and declared
she would join a convent. But when, a couple of years later, Howard
proposed to a girl from his synagogue, and Eleanor met Gavin on
Cape Cod, she knewthough she certainly didnt admit itthat her
mother had been right.
It was 1968 and Gavin had just graduated fromYale. From her raft
in the ocean Eleanor had seen him running on the beach, kicking up
sand. He seemed led by his chin, his blond hair blown back in the
breeze. A while later, when she came splashing out of the water, he
lay sideways on the sand, reading. He set down his book and smiled.
Someone pinch me.
Im not falling for that, she said.
Ah, the mermaid speaks. But does she go to restaurants?
That night, over lobster rolls and fried clams, they squeezed
lemon wedges and licked their sour fingertips and spoke about what
they wanted to do with their lives. Or Gavin spoke, and Eleanor
listened. She didnt know what she wanted to do, but she loved the
way he talkedabout his heroes, people like John Kenneth Gal-
braith, John F. Kennedy, and his own father, who had been a two-
term mayor of their Massachusetts town. He confessed to funny
habits, like keeping track of the votes of Supreme Court Justices. He
said he had his best ideas when he was running long distances, that
the world became crystal clear in the sixth mile, that he could see his
future. He said he either wanted to be a public defender or a profes-
sor. He hated hypocrisy and laziness.
Eleanor said she didnt really hate anything.
Afterward they drove to the beach and Gavin pulled apart pieces
of saltwater taffy, which they each chewed in a giggling race to name
the flavor: cinnamon, bubble gum, peach. The smell of barnacles and
wooden docks and sea foam brushed warmly over Eleanors face.
From the trunk Gavin pulled out a violin and played Bachs Arioso and
people in nearby cars turned off their engines and climbed onto their
 4 | J E N N I F E R VA N D E R B E S

hoods to listen. He seemed the most passionate and dazzling man she
had ever met.
This, of course, was before the war.
Stick it out, her mother said after they had married and Gavin
returned from Vietnam, sullen and withdrawn. A lot of war wives
were whispering about divorce. A classmate from Wellesley had paid
a weeks typing-pool wages to talk to a lawyer, then slipped Eleanor
his business card, insisting she wasnt going to spend the rest of her
life married to some nut job who threw kitchen knives at the sofa:
The foam is popping out everywhere!
Would that be Eleanors life? No, her mother said. Make the coffee
and iron his shirts. Serve him steak au poivre with baked potatoes and
kiss him before bed. Say yes if he wants to touch you, even if you are
sleeping. Dont ask whats wrong. Pretend everything is fine and soon
enough, it will be. There were few marital problems, she added, that
couldnt be cured with a baby.
Eleanor said she didnt think Gavin wanted a baby.
Her mother said, Thats why God made safety pins.
Her mother was dying, and Eleanor feared the dual blows of being
orphaned and divorced.
She got pregnant. They had Douglas, then Ginny. They moved to
Westport, Connecticut.
Their life progressed with a deliberate contentment. She tended
their new house, raised the childrenbut Gavin remained remote.
There were no violin serenades, few compliments. He spent his
mornings jogging miles in the dark, before the sun was up, and in the
evenings he pressed his eye to his large black telescope and gaped at
the moon.
There better not be a naked lady up there, shed joke.
He brought home a solid paycheck from Reynolds Insurance,
along with an annual sales bonus that allowed them a modest one-
week vacation in Newport, and on her birthday each year, a bouquet
of pink roses. He never threw knives at the furniture, never stumbled
 S T R A N G E R S AT T H E F E A S T | 5

home sour-mouthed from scotch, never leapt to the ground at the

bang of a backfiring car, and for this Eleanor counted herself lucky.
As you get older, Ellie, there are few things you want in life but
for your children to be safe and healthy, her mother said the morning
she passed away.
Eleanor would later understand what she meant.
As she sat on the sofa at night with her Readers Digest, waiting
for her husband to come home, she would take stock. What did she
have? What had she accomplished? She would look around at the pho-
tographs from family trips; Douglass high school lacrosse trophies;
Ginnys first published academic article; the crayoned artwork of
Douglass twins; and she would thinkMy children are grown and
healthy adults. I have beautiful grandchildren. She would thank the
Lord that everyone was at peace, everything was in order.
She could happily buy the groceries and weed the garden because
everyone she cared about was well.
But if someone were to try to threaten that? Was there a length to
which a mother wouldnt go?
 Jennifer Vanderbes
author of Strangers at the Feast
Jennifer Vanderbes is a graduate
of the Iowa Writers Workshop and
the recipient of numerous awards,
including a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship and a New York Public Library
Cullman Fellowship. Her debut
novel, Easter Island, was a Book-
Sense bestseller, translated into six-
teen languages, and named one of
the best books of the year by the
Washington Post and Christian Sci-
ence Monitor. Her essays and re-
views appear in The New York Times
and Washington Post. She lives
in New York City. Visit her web-
site at www.jennifervanderbes.com

Photo by Eamon Hickey

Strangers at the Feast
On sale 08/03/10
ISBN: 9781439166956
$26.00
simonandschuster.com