How do you get rid of a dinner guest who just won't get the hint? Yawning melodramatically, cleaning the kitchen, conspicuously checking your watch? I have been known to get up from the dinner table mid-conversation and stand expectantly by the front door. My guest continued droning even from halfway down the driveway. Eventually we just closed the door with a cheery, "Thanks for coming!"
It's a concept that Scottish writer Ali Smith explores in her latest novel There But For The. At a dinner party thrown by a smug social-climbing Londoner, a mild-mannered friend of a friend excuses himself just before the crème brûlée is served, goes upstairs and locks himself in a spare bedroom. He silently refuses to come out - for months.
Though the hostess, Genevieve Lee, and her husband and daughter never see him and he never talks, he begins to haunt their lives and test their relationships. (Though they do set up a sideline business cashing in on the public attention generated by their plight, by selling T-shirts and other merchandise.)
Says Genevieve in the book: "Sometimes I just sit outside the door behind which he is sitting and just say over and over to myself the word: 'Why?'"
Genevieve declares she is the peaceable and non-violent type but considers extreme measures. "A friend asked if we aren't tempted just to go ahead and use brute force and break down our beautiful and authenticated circa-17th century door and send in the police."
