Seating Arrangements

Tedious

The story is set on the fictional island of Waskeke, off the Connecticut coast. We join Winn Van Meter who is marrying off his eldest daughter, It's a weekend of precise wedding choreography.... getting it "just right". Our Winn is not the "proper gentleman" that he might want society to believe him to be, since we have found him lusting after one of the bridesmaids, feuding with his youngest daughter and pulling his hair out over all the wrong things. Winn is behind the camera through much of the story, and since we have already found him ogling the bridesmaid, it comes as no surprise that he is also smothered in lusts of many kinds. He is also a "social joiner", starting with "Ophidian", an elite ...and also fictional... Harvard club, show more and he seems willing to happily offer his first born or sell his soul for entry to Waskeke’s Pequod, the exclusive and prestigious golf club. I did think that the name he gave his house was rather clever, the “Proper Dews,” ...but alas, the Pequod was much less impressed than I was:) From the Book: “For three years he had kept a bitter evening vigil on the widow’s walk, staring out at what he could see of the course from the house: . . . that bit of grass was the gateway to a verdant male haven and confessional.” There were too many frequent shifts in point of view, giving the book a dance-like feel. In the first five sentences, the author hinted at the sexual tension that holds out through the three-day span that the story takes place in. We are introduced to the two daughters, a wife with the awful name of Biddy...and then, the threat of adultery is slipped in. Trying to describe it was difficult, but it boils down to a lot of unlikable characters, yet in spite of that, it was their attitudes and outlooks on life that made them complicated and interesting. Winn, as you will expect only minutes after meeting him, is just a pompous social-climbing blowhard. I didn't find anything about him to even slightly like. In a nutshell, the story is about very rich people behaving very, very badly and expecting everyone else to be forgiving. This quote pretty much hits it on the head. Reading Seating Arrangements is like looking into a mirror or peeking through the window, the gin-soaked escapades are difficult to turn away from.” —The Phoenix - Portland, Maine show less

Maggie Shipstead is an accomplished, creative, and insightful author; and you know it from the way she writes. The words are woven in such a way that indicates the author is fully aware of her skill. It got in the way of enjoying the story initially, but soon I fell into the dysfunctional yet ethereal groove she created. Beautifully explored characters and a teaspoon of mysticism set in a the drama of a wedding between two rich white families make an odd threesome. Shipstead tacitly acknowledges the challenge in her writing and tackles it. She may have even intentionally created it herself. It took 89 pages to find one that I wished to fold over and return to. A good read, to be sure, but no need to go far out of your way to get your show more hands on a copy. show less

The Van Meter family are gathering at their New England island holiday home to celebrate the wedding of oldest daughter Daphne. Patriarch Winn Van Meter should be looking forward to a joyous weekend, but he is facing it all with a kind of dread. He feels age creeping up on him; discontented with his life, and harbouring a lust for an entirely inappropriate woman, the scene is set for a disastrous couple of days. Meanwhile his youngest daughter Livia is recovering after a relationship break-up, his wife Biddy is patiently trying to ignore her husband’s erratic behaviour – and just why won’t the Pequot gentlemans’ club accept him as a member?!

I am in two minds about this book. The things I liked were: Maggie Shipstead’s turn of show more phrase. She has an amusingly cynical turn of phrase which made me smile in places at the absurdity of the situations. And…nope, that’s actually about all I liked.

What I didn’t like was almost all of the characters. It’s not necessary for me to like a character in order to enjoy a book, but there has to be something about them that makes me want to read about them – if not likeable, then they should be interesting. This book is told mostly from Winn’s point of view (albeit in the third person) and quite frankly he is not likeable, not interesting and ultimately pretty pathetic. I don’t think he is meant to be a likeable character, but I don’t know whether he is meant to be quite so exasperating. I am not sure in fact why anyone in his family puts up with him; he’s basically a privileged, narrow minded, self-centred egotist, complaining about how hard done to he is. Nothing is his fault, it’s always someone else to blame.

Livia was probably the second most prominent character and she wasn’t much better, although her youth and heartbreak excuse her somewhat. Unfortunately the most likeable characters – Dominique, Greyson and Biddy – are never really explored, because they are the most level headed and decent among the party, and this book is not about level headed decent people!

I realise it’s meant to be satire, but despite the eloquence of the writing, it’s not really funny enough to work. It’s not awful – it certainly held my attention – but it’s just…meh! While I realise that money and privilege does not preclude people from being depressed and unhappy, the things that were causing Winn to be miserable were so ridiculous it was just hard to feel any sympathy at all. I can see that some people might love this book – regrettably I’m not one of them. show less

I enjoyed this book as one might enjoy being a fly on the wall, watching an excruciatingly slow train wreck unfold before your eyes and being guiltily thankful that you're not involved in the messy aftermath.

I know and grew up alongside shitty families like this, so I suppose I found this equal parts entertaining and sad that there are real humans like this who exist, breathe in and out with disdain every day and complain about the stench from . . . whatever might be bothering them at that particular moment.

Art imitating life? Most assuredly.

Reading about the New England seersucker-clad jet set kind of leaves me cold, even with the mild bite of satire and even when the pink polo shirts look like they might be starting to develop a feeling (other than drunkenness)(is drunkenness a feeling?)(okay, other than jealousy).

Winn spends most of the novel, which takes place over the weekend of his daughter's wedding, demonstrating his supreme selfishness. He's preoccupied with getting into a particular country club, bedding one of the bridesmaids, and generally exercising minute control over his image (especially as it's projected to other men). He is endlessly, cruelly critical. His empathy bottoms out on family members, especially his daughters. I basically hated Winn. (His rare show more flickers of vulnerability, rather than inducing sympathy for him, made him more despicable because of how they failed to change him.)

Luckily, Shipstead volleys the narration among other characters' viewpoints; the problem is that only one of them is even remotely likeable (Dominique). This is probably on purpose. Shipstead doesn't seem to think very highly of the materialistic Harvard boys' club culture whose members keep brands like Nautica in business; and yet, she writes an entire novel about them which only barely succeeds in satirizing their shiny, empty lives. At the end she starts to humanize a couple of the characters, but the hope of permanent change is still distant and dim.

The book's epigraph is from The Wasteland. Shipstead (in addition to some truly clever dialogue) actually does a pretty good job of stacking her own vision of a particular slice of society onto Eliot's vision and showing where edges line up. But I already read The Wasteland...and it was depressing. Another prose rendering of it, sans hope, is just an overdose of cynicism for me. show less

Here's a quick diagnostic to assess whether you'd enjoy this book:

If someone told you they were wearing seersucker ironically, would you walk away or would you ask how it was working for them?

Seating Arrangements is populated with characters in seersucker, whale belts and pastel pop-collared polos, and very few of them wear--or do--anything with irony. Those that try largely fail. So we are surrounded by Biddy and Mopsy and Oatsie (I kid you not) and more last-names-as-first names than the freshman class of Hah-vahd, all organized around a wedding and the middle-age flailings of Winn Van Meter. It's almost as easy to hate these people as it is to dismiss them.

And yet I didn't hate them or dismiss them. You might (see question above), show more but I was entertained on nearly every page, and even moved. Maggie Shipstead's writing is superb; I crossed from admiration into envy several times. She manages to weave the back story into the grim present with finesse, and we come to see that for all their stuffy posturing, their suffering (and loyalty) is very real. It's a neat trick, and served up with plenty of laughs. show less