“P’s Parties” by Jhumpa Lahiri

For this installment of the “How It Works (I Think)” short story analysis blog, let’s look at Jhumpa Lahiri’s “P’s Parties” from the July 10 – July 17^th issue of The New Yorker. The New Yorker does allow non-subscribers some free articles every month, so I encourage you to follow the link above and first read the story, whether or not you’re a subscriber. What follows contains spoilers! Page references are to the print edition, by page and column.

In the first installment of “How It Works (I Think),” I started with a distinction between a story’s “surface action” (what happens in the story) and the “understory” (what it means). This distinction is especially useful with Lahiri’s story because we have an unreliable narrator. He tells us both what happens and draws explicit conclusions about what it means to him, but the real understory is the meaning Lahiri shapes for the reader, which I think is sharply at odds with what the narrator suggests.

The surface action takes place in Italy, mostly in Rome with a final sequence on an island in the Mediterranean. The narrator is a married Italian male writer in late middle age who becomes infatuated with a somewhat younger woman he meets at one of his friend P’s annual parties. The story is structured around four encounters between the nameless narrator, whom I will call N, and the woman, a married “foreigner” known in the story only by the initial L. Over the course of their encounters, which unfold over several years either at one of P’s parties or at P’s island retreat, N’s relationship with L is mainly imaginary, based on a single brief candid conversation, some charged looks, and a party at which they dance together.

By contrast, to N’s chagrin, L and N’s wife become real friends, which gives N writer’s block (more on this later), which he briefly overcomes while writing a short story at P’s island retreat based on his relationship with L; in this story N and L have a full-blown affair. This fictional affair spurs N to finally take overt action in real life: at the end of their final meeting at P’s island house, after he learns L and her husband will be leaving the country, N gives L an unwanted farewell kiss. L recoils from this kiss, which happens in full view of N’s wife as L and her family are taking their leave, and N immediately asks for L’s forgiveness, which she does not give. N’s wife is outraged, both by her husband’s act of infidelity and because L is her friend, but they paper it over and their marriage moves on. N abandons his story about L.

P’s death and funeral is a fifth major movement in the story. N likens the funeral to one of P’s parties, which L does not attend and which becomes an occasion for the narrator to sum up his relationship with P and, to a lesser extent, L.

N concludes that P, “to whom I owe these pages,” was “a singular woman, radiant, the only one with the strength to bring us all together” (55-3). Her parties have “stayed with” N, “and the thought of them still quickens the heart” because they gave N “hours of sublime detachment” (55-3). In the story’s final lines, N claims that P’s gatherings also provided him “A setting I cherished, a promising start I tried to finish, to put into words, in which I’d been, briefly, a wayward husband, an inspired author, a happy man” (55-3).

A reader might remember that very early in the story, N retrospectively characterizes his relationship with L, before he narrates it, with a peculiar mixture of dismissiveness and significance, as “an ultimately banal disruption that remains a caesura in my life” (46-1). So in N’s mind, by the end of the story, L herself has become “a peripheral figure” (55-3). Instead, we’re left with N’s bittersweet tale of a brief shining moment for himself, facilitated by P and her social graces, a focus which is reflected in the story’s title: “P’s Parties.”

Now let’s go back through the story to see how Lahiri creates an understory for the reader that is at odds with the ostensible story N tells.

The first major sign that N is a suspect narrator is his description of P’s guests: “On one side, there were those like me and my wife, old friends of P and her husband who came every year, and on the other, our counterparts: foreigners who’d show up for a few years, sometimes just once” (45-1). The word “foreigners” jars, and things get worse as he elaborates in an anthropological tone: “They were a nomadic population that piqued my interest—prototypes, perhaps, for one of my future stories” (45-1). He sees them as “other” and available for his use. N goes on to describe how these “nomads” learn Rome’s imperial history (“which emperor succeeded which, and what they accomplished”). N notes contemporary Rome’s “alarming decline,” but personally he “could never leave it behind” (45-2). So in essence N is describing two groups at the party: the imperialists and the outsiders, marked by differences in appearance and speech, who fit the role of the colonized.

N’s use of the word “foreigners” is part of a pattern in which he drops a word or observation that undercuts a reader’s sympathy for him: he describes P as liking to “churn” her different friends together; he says his wife’s “tendency to be long-winded [was] getting on my nerves” (46-1); on a visit to his son, who is living abroad in a “multi-ethnic neighborhood” (49-1) in what seems like London, with a girlfriend who has “parents from two different continents,” he laments eating “bizarre and expensive food” (49-1). Of course, he doesn’t use any racial or ethnic slurs, but he seems both fascinated by and uncomfortable with cultural difference.

To keep the story from simplifying, Lahiri balances these harsh character notes with more sympathetic ones: there are moments when N gains sympathy by expressing vulnerability: his son’s move abroad leaves N with “a hole in my heart” (46-2); an encounter with a motorboat while swimming off P’s island leaves him “feeling, slow, weak, frightened” (54-1); he fears getting old. He has never betrayed his wife “in this city where everyone’s always cheating on everyone.” “I was used to being the one who got dumped or cheated on” (50-2). If you’re inclined to read N negatively, you might hear self-pity in some of these moments; Lahiri’s descriptions of N and his thoughts often have a double-jointed quality: read from one angle they may seem innocuous or even endearing; read from a different angle, they seem subtly damning.

In addition, N has appealing moments of self-criticism and self-awareness, though Lahiri also finds ways to undercut them. For example, on the visit to his son’s city, he uses thoughts about his son to criticize himself: “I worried that he wasn’t mature enough, that deep down he felt unhappy, that he’d end up in some kind of trouble. But that naïve and vulnerable boy was not my son: he was me” (49-1). So for a moment we’re invited to admire N’s critical self-awareness; he’s called himself out for projecting his own character flaws onto his son.

But then he goes on to say, “Or rather, he was the version of me I’d never allowed to form, that I’d neglected, blocked out—a version that, even without ever having existed, had defeated me” (49-1). He seems to be saying he never allowed himself a naïve, adventurous time of life; he was afraid to be the vulnerable innocent abroad. But through the use of the word “rather,” he also ends up rejecting the criticism that he is immature, unhappy, and headed for trouble, though arguably the rest of the story proves these things to be true. And in the very next line his equanimity seems largely restored: “With this thought in my head, I strolled around my son’s new city, patiently admiring bridges, gardens, and monuments, beneath a low and leaden sky” (49-1). The trappings of a city which is the seat of an imperial power, albeit one with a low and leaden sky, settle him down. Lahiri suggests N’s self-awareness may be transitory, not deep-rooted.

Lahiri uses this dichotomy between N as sympathetic and perceptive versus N as blinkered and infected with imperialist ideas of race and the Other to frame an understory drama closely tied to the surface action drama about whether L and N will have an affair: is she really interested in him, or is he lying to himself, unaware of how his fantasies objectify her through a possessive, imperialist lens?

His first encounter with L suggests she sees him as an empathetic person with whom she can speak candidly, feeding his sense that she is really interested in him and making him seem sympathetic to the reader. At one of P’s parties, L’s son has a fainting episode on the lawn. Everyone comes to look, and N notices L: “She was a foreigner, you could tell, right away by her facial features. She was wearing a summery dress unsuited to the season; a heavy and complicated necklace adorned a triangle of bare skin” (47-2). This description combines astute perception (noticing her dress and jewelry are off for the occasion) with more objectifying language (“foreigner,” “triangle of bare skin”).

A doctor at the party determines L’s son is okay. The other guests drift away, but N remains nearby, “paralyzed by the thought that the same thing could just as easily happen to my son” (47-3). No words pass between L and N during this phase of the encounter. However, as N and his wife are leaving the party, N’s wife realizes she has left her shawl behind and sends N to get it. As he finds it, he sees L and they have a conversation.

In their brief exchange, a surprising amount of intimacy is established: she notes, seemingly approvingly, N was the only person to linger in the aftermath of her son’s crisis; she claims her husband loves Rome more than her; after N speaks to her with formal pronouns, she asks to use familiar pronouns; they establish the common ground of a son about which they worry. The degree to which they bond, “instantly bridging the solitary distance between two strangers,” leaves N “reeling” (48-2).

L over-shares—maybe out of loneliness and distress, maybe because as someone living internationally she is used to having to connect quickly with strangers—but N, who is attracted to L’s “weathered beauty”(47-2), seems predisposed to think of their relationship through a romantic lens, and this brief encounter turbocharges his infatuation.

In their second encounter at another of P’s parties, N tries to pursue his infatuation but it becomes clear, or it should be clear to him, that he is presuming too much based on their first encounter. He stares her down, and she ignores him, “until all of a sudden she lifted her gaze, for an instant, and revealed her eyes to me—filled (I thought) with fury and exasperation, blinding eyes that were shining (I hoped) for me” (50-2). Again, Lahiri has created a doubleness in the moment that allows for opposing interpretations: her fury and exasperation can be read in a straightforward way: stop looking at me, this is inappropriate, you’re misinterpreting our earlier conversation. But his hope allows for a contrasting interpretation: her eyes are shining with interest; her fury and exasperation denote passionate feelings towards N.

So despite her uninviting look, he begins to fantasize about a relationship with her. The terms in which he imagines this relationship are revealing and suggest a damning conclusion to the understory: he repeatedly frames relationships in which there is a component of solitary ownership.

N first uses an image of solitary possession in the context of observing his wife reading her emails on their flight home from visiting their son. Though he professes not to be a jealous person, he seems threatened by all of her messages from “mysterious senders. A densely inhabited world, buzzing with activity, hers alone” (49-2). That phrase “hers alone” is echoed from his perspective in his musings about himself and L: in the aftermath of their first conversation, he hopes for moments between himself and L that would be “ours alone…an acceptable form of infidelity, entirely forgivable” (50-2)(my emphasis).

One of these moments occurs during L and N’s third meeting, at an unusual evening party at P’s centered on dancing. On the crowded dance floor, partners shift and N ends up dancing with L: “She and I danced, together, on our own. It was a torment, also a triumph. We would lock eyes for a moment, here and there I’d feel my body brushing hers, a shoulder, a hip” (52-1). N again uses the phrase “on our own” to emphasize his sense of exclusive possession. While for the reader, their second encounter should have suggested L was not interested, even offended, this encounter reanimates, for both the reader and N, the possibility of an affair. On the other hand, group dancing at a party is not necessarily meaningful. And there’s a hint that N is adding to the objective fact of dancing together an overly subjective interpretation:  “But underneath it all I sensed that we were being reckless, conspiratorial” (52-1).

In the aftermath of the dance party, the ownership theme takes a surprising turn when L and N’s wife become friends: N’s wife does not invite L to their house; but instead L is “a person she’d spend time with on her own now and then, in her own way” (52-3) (my emphasis). N concludes that he and L “shared my wife” (53-1). Though N recognizes such a friendship is “normal,” he also “agonized over it. My writing suffered” (53-1). A blow to his sense of ownership disturbs N’s control over his fictions.

N’s fourth and final encounter with L takes place at P’s island retreat. N and his wife stay in a bungalow that N characterizes as “a cozy space, masculine in feeling” (53-3). In general, the spaces P creates for N nurture him: “At P’s parties I felt embraced, cared for, and at the same time blissfully ignored, free” (46-1). Not surprisingly, in P’s island environment, his writing comes back, and he begins drafting a story about L. In this story, their first encounter leads to a real affair, and he re-establishes a sense of sole ownership of L: “I inserted the scene where we danced together, and also on our own—it felt like a critical juncture in the plot—and I left out L’s friendship with my wife” (54-1).

Up until this point, he has allowed his “affair” to exist only in his imagination, but when L and her husband arrive by boat at P’s island retreat, driven by “an impulse intensified by my own imagined version of our affair, I now yearned to kiss her mouth, to taste her salty skin, to solidify our connection at last without having to share it with anyone else” (54-3). This is the climactic moment in his drive for exclusive ownership. (By the way, the progression in this chain of ownership references has a plot-like movement that illustrates why I like to call a story’s exploration of a theme an “understory.”)

So his insistence on not having to share L with anyone else marks a decisive statement about his character and his morally suspect desire for L. However, for the moment, his fantasy is thwarted by her cool handshake and brief “Ciao” greeting (54-3). At this point, the reader can be sure the affair will never happen, but N’s fantasies of possession are too energized. “Tast[ing] her salty skin” recalls a coarse moment early in the story when he refers to P’s children: “three boys in quick succession, and then, like a simple but welcome dessert after a three-course meal, a girl” (45-2). N’s true male imperialist sensibility unequivocally wins out over his better qualities: with a thin façade of table manners, he wants to “eat the Other,” as bell hooks once described, to consume “the foreign adventure” he’s always been afraid of having.

He glimpses “L’s dark, muscular legs.” He focuses on that “extraordinary divot of flesh outlined by her collarbone and shoulders” (54-3). Like Humbert Humbert, N is so caught up in what he might imagine to be his artful turns of phrase, he doesn’t realize how repulsive his use of “divot of flesh” is. When L and her husband are taking their leave, N’s unreliable decorum falters: “in that moment of confusion, I kissed her, at first on the cheek, but then my mouth drifted down toward the salty skin of her collarbone, planting itself in that sunken triangle” (55-1). Almost immediately, he mutters “Forgive me.” He goes on to lambaste himself: “I cursed my own stupidity, steeped in embarrassment” (55-2). This seems to mark a return to critical self-awareness. But his phrase “in that moment of confusion” is more telling: he’s really not aware of what he’s doing.

And in any case, his self-criticism turns out to be transitory, just as we saw earlier. Instead, he manages to blame his wife for the immediate consequences of his sexual abuse of L: “She [his wife] went on attacking me, then burst into tears, transforming my creative sanctuary into a hell” (55-1). After describing how he and his wife drift back to their old ways, holding hands at P’s funeral, he concludes the story by rhapsodizing about P, the woman who makes him feel good, instead of L, “a peripheral figure,” a word that evokes the imperialist’s sense of center and periphery, who exposed the meanest aspects of his character.

In the end, the overwhelming implication of the story is that the narrator is largely unaware of his deep flaws. The story anatomizes the personality of a superficially genteel and sensitive sexual harasser, who sentimentalizes his own dramas while forgetting the harm he does to others. N inadvertently gives the reader a portrait of himself as a pathetic and small-souled man trapped in an objectifying racist/colonialist mindset.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!