FICTION

Anton DiSclafani

The After Party

Riverhead Books

Hardcover, 978-1-5946-3316-4 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 384 pgs., $26.00

May 17, 2016

Joan “the jewel” Fortier, “Houston’s most famous socialite,” is twenty-five years old in 1957. She’s always chafed against restrictions imposed by her inherited position in society, but her behavior is increasingly erratic. Cece Buchanan, Joan’s best friend since before they can remember, believes it her “job to protect her [Joan] from herself,” to persuade Joan to behave, to “fall-in.” But Joan will not be tamed: keeping secrets, keeping company with strange men, disappearing from her family and friends; when she’s present, her state is clearly chemically altered.

Cece is hurt by Joan’s withdrawal and obsessed with whatever Joan is up to. When this fixation begins to threaten Cece’s marriage, she must choose. Cece, who observes that “most unhappy people … wanted contradictory things,” is torn between the comfortable, known world of her husband and son, and “the great big world of the night” that Joan represents.

The After Party, Anton DiSclafani’s second novel, set in the Houston neighborhood of River Oaks (where the houses have names and there’s enough alcohol to fill the swimming pools), follows the fateful events of a single summer in the lives of a clique of debutantes and illustrates the consequences of violating the stultifying conventions of a rigid society. Making liberal use of flashbacks, the story is told in first person by Cece (the “yawn”), revealing the history of a friendship. Cece has been spared obscurity amid the brighter lights of these debutantes by her association with Joan, the sun to Cece’s moon.

The After Party’s narrative is brisk and compelling, but the plot is time-worn. While the novel makes for a pleasant diversion, DiSclafani’s writing is not particularly powerful. However, her ability to invoke a historical atmosphere and era is effective. The foreshadowing can be heavy-handed, but it does keep the pages turning. The constant talk of money, clothes, and position eventually becomes tiresome. But ultimately none of these things are the point. The centerpiece of The After Party is the complicated friendship between Cece and Joan, two complex and vividly drawn characters.

DiSclafani’s cast are not particularly sympathetic, but they’re intriguing in a bug-under-glass manner. The dichotomy is that, while these characters seem to be strikingly shallow at first glance, it’s not the individual characters that are shallow, but rather that the society they live in imposes it on them as a condition of acceptance. “I wished [Joan] could see how mentioning the articles she read,” Cece thinks, “the places she wanted to go—all the ways in which we were not enough—won her no favors among us.”

Cece opens a voyeur’s window into this rarefied world, but the view disappoints. It glitters—but this gossipy Junior League set are provincial faux sophisticates forever engaged in spiteful, envious competition (“Sometimes it was exhausting, remembering all the ways we measured each other. The ruler was long and precise.”)—big fish in a small pond. In the end, the secrets hidden by the HOA-regulation-height hedges are truly shocking and the final page is just right.