On Classic Party Fiction

“Parties were sometimes fun and sometimes not, but fun was beside the point,” Podhoretz writes, “for me they always served as a barometer of the progress of my career.” For all that’s terrible about the movie (the book is racist, too), the party scene is truly great. It’s an improvement, I think, on the scene in the novella, a “stag party” where the only women in attendance are Holly Golightly and her six-foot-tall, jolie laide model friend Mag Wildwood (“She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty”).

Source: www.theparisreview.org