emotional risks and blighted lives in Lisa Gornick's Peacock Feast

Every so often you come across a novel whose emotional range and complexity defies summary.  The Peacock Feast is that kind of book.  Yes, the title is confounding because the image of a peacock with its fanned plumage is foreshortened when paired with the word feast. But this hints at important themes which are explored so beautifully in this intelligent and satisfying novel.

The story begins with a vulgar extraveganza of a party, a Peacock Feast given by Louis C Tiffany in 1916. The great men of the day were all invited.  Roasted peacocks were served on silver platters, their plumes used as decoration. Pretty girls and children outfitted as miniature chefs served up all the dishes.

But the repercussions of this party carry across a century, in the lives of Tiffany's daughter Dorothy - who becomes the partner of Anna Freud, and more importantly, in the family of Tiffany's head gardener.  This is a novel about extravagant lives that are emotionally destitute and emotionally complicated lives that are tragically blighted.  It's a story involving twins, servants, decorators, the aspirational and the filthy rich.  It's about lives cut short, families which are torn apart, and the people who end up picking up the slack.

The main character Prudence is 101 years old when her grand niece Grace appears on her doorstep. Her arrival causes Prudence to look back on and reevaluate her life.  Prudence, who in her younger days was an interior designer, decides that Grace is a woman who  "looks as if she shoos away beauty. A person for whom renovation would be possible but who has no desire to undertake it".    Yet Grace is a hospice nurse, accustomed to ushering people through that final transition.  Her work is "nursing in its purest form without hope of cure, with hope only of alleviating suffering."

We feel at once that Grace has an emotional depth Prudence lacks, in spite of  Prudence's physical affluence, and as the story progresses we understand that Prudence has been "a coward of the heart."

The story takes us from the Guided Age to a hippie commune in the 1960s, from San Francisco to Paris and to New York. It gives us bereft parents and grandparents, and dysfunctional kids. It gives us alternative choices followed through to their conclusions, with missteps and collateral damage along  the way.

"I want you to live - I want you to let yourself be touched, I want you to risk everything to find love," Prudence tells Grace at the end of the book.   But it seems to me that almost all the characters have taken their own kinds of risks. It's just that some paid off and others destroyed lives.

Lisa Gornick will be reading from her novel at Politics and Prose on February 10 at 3:00 and I will be introducing her.  I'll try to post something more after the event - but hopefully this has piqued your interest.

#peacockfeast