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T A B L E+T A L K

Is Shakespeare the best way to get students into the classics? Post thy thoughts in the Books area of Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

The role model syndrome
By Jake Lamar
Two new memoirs by talented black women show how hard it is to reconcile good writing and racial politics
(10/13/97)

R E C E N T L Y

The End of the Novel of Love
By Vivian Gornick
Nonfiction
(10/27/97)

A Calendar of Wisdom
By Leo Tolstoy
Nonfiction
(10/24/97)

New York Mosaic
By Isabel Bolton
Fiction
(10/23/97)

The New Men
By Brian Murphy
Nonfiction
(10/22/97)

Jackie Robinson
By Arnold Rampersad
Nonfiction
(10/21/97)

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BY DWIGHT GARNER | From the epic feasts in Rabelais' novels to Martha Stewart's "Entertaining," there are thousands of books that can advise you on how to throw a decent party. (A personal favorite is Kingsley Amis' "On Drink," published in 1973. Amis viciously satirizes those penny-pinching hosts -- he calls them "mean sods" -- who stint their guests on the alcohol.) Some of these books have more frills than others; some advocate more debauchery. But it wouldn't be a stretch to boil the wisdom contained in the entire genre down to the Zen simplicity of the Golden Rule: Treat your guests the way you'd like to be treated.

No one needs another book about parties, and to her credit, Sally Quinn hasn't really written one. Her new book, titled "The Party," doesn't offer up anything remotely new on the etiquette or revelry front, unless you count a few tips for power hostesses -- how to handle guests who've been publicly disgraced, say, or how to maintain a seating chart at dinner when half of your guests are officials likely to be summoned to the White House or TV journalists on call to cover breaking stories. Instead, "The Party" reads like a vacuum-packed slice of memoir; it's a miniature epic of name-dropping and score-settling. It's also an unintentional, almost Whartonesque elegy for the capitol's fading WASP elite. Quinn and her husband, legendarily gruff former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, may still number among the city's most influential couples, but Bradlee's in his 70s, and it's been a long time since Quinn made her name as a Post political and social reporter. Her white-bread idea of le tout Washington will not be everyone's.

There's no index at the close of "The Party," but the book is such a personal compendium of darts and laurels that it's hard to believe some scrappy Washington journal like Roll Call won't whip one up. Each dollop of advice arrives with some celebrity sparkle. To illustrate her point that big events can make a party memorable, she recounts the night of Vince Foster's suicide, when Quinn and Bradley had 48 people for a dinner honoring Ken Auletta, and the evening of the O.J. Simpson civil trial verdict, during which Rob Reiner provided running commentary in her living room. Mike Nichols drops in for pizza, illustrating the joys of no-pressure entertaining. We witness senators, CIA directors and even presidents strolling through the front door. (The perfect party, Quinn writes, is one that features "the President and First Lady coming for cocktails and then leaving before dinner so that everyone could relax and talk about it for the rest of the evening.") When conversation flags, she advises, change the subject to sex. This worked until the night infidelity became a topic at Quinn's table, and Nora Ephron stood up and dumped a bottle of red wine on husband Carl Bernstein's cheatin' head -- a moment later memorialized in Ephron's novel "Heartburn."

If there's a desperate quality about Quinn's name-dropping, she digs into her score-settling with a terrifying glee. Pamela Harriman comes in for multiple attacks, as does Arianna Huffington, whom Quinn criticizes for inviting a gang of professional skeptics (Andrew Sullivan, et al.) to her house and then forcing them to opine about New Age spirituality. ("As you can imagine," Quinn quips, "the dinner was an unmitigated disaster for the hostess ...") Huffington is a public figure. She can take her lumps. Many other lesser-known hostesses are singled out by name for such offenses as serving too much drink without food -- at one such party, Quinn watches Princess Margaret get drunk and stumble about -- or inviting Pavarotti to dine without checking his current dietary requirements. Of the Pavarotti debacle, she writes, "There was hostess's blood on the floor."

The biggest offense, in Quinn's view, is forcing guests to suffer through what she terms a "Philadelphia Rat Fuck" -- that is, a party where there are too many people, or they haven't been selected with enough care. In the end, "The Party" feels like its own kind of inside-the-Beltway rat fuck, one that has ego and bile to burn. And as with all rat fucks, one supposes, it's almost always impossible to tell who's really on the receiving end.
SALON | Oct. 28, 1997