As discussed earlier this year, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway remains a hauntingly relevant work a hundred years on from publication. Lee Conell's The Party is undoubtedly indebted to Woolf's work. Not only is it about class, but the novel's action is set over the course of a day, which begins optimistically but ends more tragically. I certainly did not see Conell's ending coming, but it is somewhat balanced by a more optimistic epilogue. The majority of the novel's action occurs in an Upper West Side mansion block in New York, where the key protagonists live. Alternating chapters feature the perspective of the block's Super and his daughter, the latter recently returned to live with her parents after an arguably wasted liberal arts degree and failed relationship. Their relationship to each other and towards the block's tenants (Ruby's best friend from childhood and the host of the eponymous party lives in the penthouse flat) forms the crux of the novel. The novel captures the block's ecosystem and the way class informs every interaction, reaction, and relationship inside it. Conell can be both very funny and also highly empathetic to her characters, but the novel did occasionally veer off piste and could have been tighter in structure. Nonetheless, a promising debut: 7.5/10.
By Lee Conell