People of all ages embrace the excuse to drown in sentimentality (or alcohol) on New Year’s Eve. So why, in novels, is the event tainted by doom or despair?
In fiction, New Year’s Eve almost invariably proves a fiasco. Often it is tainted by doom or despair. In George Eliot’s novel “Silas Marner”, it prompts Squire Cass, a minor aristocrat, to host an opulent dance. His son Godfrey’s estranged wife, Molly, travels there, intending to expose his shabby behaviour, only to collapse en route and die in the snow.
Less morbid, though still bleak, is the subgenre of modern novel in which a New Year’s Eve party exposes the fault lines in a marriage or in society at large. Margaret Drabble’s “The Radiant Way” features a couple for whom such a celebration becomes an unbearable chapter of “hints, glances, sliding words, oblique smiles, incomprehensible references”.
Nick McDonell gives the occasion a sharply contemporary spin in “Twelve”, a portrait of Manhattanites cramped by privilege—one of whom, a drug addict, guns down half his social circle at a New Year’s Eve shindig. It is at a rather less edgy gathering to mark the same holiday that Lila, the bright star of
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