Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead – review

A tightly plotted and sharply comic story of a father forced to confront his feelings as his daughter prepares to marry

Anita Sethi

Sunday 21 July 2013

T

he timeframe of this taut, highly accomplished debut novel is only three days during the wedding week of the elder daughter of the affluent Van Meter family, yet such is the author's skill that whole lifetimes are compellingly captured within it. Simmering beneath the surface of single days are memories and frustrated fantasies of ghostly lives not lived, vying for attention. It's with a sharply satirical prose style that Shipstead – winner of the 2012 Dylan Thomas prize – succeeds in stripping back slick social exteriors to reveal that world within. The contrast between what seethes inside 59-year-old father Winn and his carefully crafted carapace creates this novel's considerable tension and humour.

The engaging narrative is elegantly arranged to encompass lives of increasing disarray. Winn has packed his bags with "geometric precision" to travel from Connecticut to the family holiday home in the remote New England island of Waskeke, where his pregnant daughter Daphne is to marry. But Winn manages to fold away his feelings with far less precision, taking with him emotional baggage of which he is comically unaware, and becoming entangled in a messy flirtation with one of the young, beautiful bridesmaids, Agatha. But for Winn being in lust brings little compensation for being out of love with his wife and life.

The father-daughter relationship is exquisitely rendered as Shipstead evokes the guilt and shame that drives a family apart and yet the yearning for empathy that binds them closely together. Winn wishes that he could glimpse life through his daughter's perspective: "He wanted to see it, too, what she was looking at, but he saw only tables, only faces." Despite their geographical and biological proximity, the remoteness between these characters is as vast as the Atlantic ocean that surrounds them. The metaphor of the dance is beautifully brought out, as people glide together and push apart, and Winn must learn the art of keeping his daughter close to his heart while simultaneously letting her go, "releasing her into a life of her own making".

Although Shipstead ties up her plot-strands too neatly, throughout is the assured hand of a writer who knows that despite the most meticulous planning, often the most momentous things happen quite by chance – in both life and literature. There are echoes of another great arranger in fiction – Virginia Woolf crafting Mrs Dalloway's dinner party, which took place over an even tighter timeframe of a single day. These novelists show the power of suppressed, chaotic inner lives of "intense, vibrating need" – left off the invitation list but clamouring to be accounted for with often disastrous, but deliciously entertaining, consequences.

THE GUARDIAN