On a late summer night in a small Virginia town, a woman of seventy-five climbs a stepladder in her pajamas, pulls it up onto the roof after her, and sits at the edge with her knees drawn up, announcing that she would like to look at Orion in peace. The neighbors come out onto their lawns. One arrives carrying a stick. Her son turns up late, having stopped to eat two slices of the pizza that was delivered just as the crisis began. The aunt who telephoned the police is in the porch hammock, fast asleep, and only when the old woman on the roof sees this does she agree to come down. Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch opens with scenes like this one, and for a long time it seems content to be a comedy of mortifying families. It turns out to be something more patient and more serious.
A Town Where Everyone Is Somebody’s Problem
Point Royal sits in the Shenandoah Valley, close enough to Washington that the call-in radio shows are still chewing over the impeachment. The two women on Temporary Road, Holly and her aunt Fiona, are the comic engine of the first half. They have lived together across several continents and several marriages, and they fight with the stamina of people who know each other’s every weakness. When Fiona takes their shared car to the pub, Holly tries to report her own half of it stolen, and the policewoman on the other end of the phone has to explain, very patiently, that a car cannot be stolen by halves.
Holly’s son Will is caught between them. He runs a secondhand bookshop, he is amiable, evasive and impossible to dislike for long, and his life is quietly starting to come loose. His first wife walked out on him and their two small children years ago and was never heard from again. Now his daughter Gail, grown and furious, has hired an agency to find her, and Will wants nothing to do with it. His second wife, Elizabeth, has the sharpest eyes at every table in the novel, and much of the book’s tension lives in what she sees and chooses not to say.
Bausch writes the town in short present-tense scenes that pass from one consciousness to the next: Will, Elizabeth, a widowed contractor and his police-officer daughter, and an elderly priest at the parish church. What connects them is less plot than proximity, the way a small place makes everyone a witness to everyone else. The contractor, newly hired to divide the old women’s house in two, drinks more than he should and knows it; his daughter, divorced and short of money, is raising a near-silent four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old who talks like a dictionary. Their household is the warmest in Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch, and the plainest about what it costs to keep a family afloat.
The Priest at the Edge of the Frame
The quietest of these figures is the most affecting. Brother Fire has been a priest for half a century, and his trouble now is not doubt but exhaustion: the words of his prayers have stopped meaning anything as he says them. He rereads the Summa Theologica for comfort and tells a dinner table that Aquinas, at the end of his life, dismissed his whole great book as straw. He lives with an eager young curate who writes devotional verse so dreadful it rhymes Donne with bun, and Brother Fire praises it, asks God’s pardon for the lie, and goes on praising it.
The poems are funny the first time and the second. By the fifth recital the joke has become a habit, and this is typical of where Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch loses its grip. The book is long, and its middle is padded: the old women’s negotiations over windows and kitchens are replayed several times, and the narration sometimes pauses for essayistic reflections on the century that slow things without adding much.
What the Table at Thanksgiving Night Hides
Everything bends toward the holiday. Holly decides that the whole extended circle will eat together at the house on Temporary Road, finished or not. Gail is bringing her new partner, Edie, a brash people-finder from Philadelphia whom Will privately dreads. Elizabeth arrives carrying knowledge she has told no one. By this point Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch has made sure the reader knows more than any single guest, and the dramatic irony of the afternoon is close to unbearable.
The dinner itself is the best thing in the book. For hours it is polite and almost dull: talk of swing music and football and knitting, someone’s son ribbed about the salmon he insisted on bringing, wine refilled a little too often at one end of the table. Outside, melting snow gives way to mist and then a cold rain. Underneath, Elizabeth sees the whole meal as a performance staged over cracks that nobody will name, and Bausch keeps both layers going at once without strain. Edie, presented early on through Will’s prejudice, becomes the most generous person present, a reversal the novel earns.
The reservations are real. The narration dwells on Edie’s body in ways that read as leering even if they are meant as Will’s view. The final chapters also soften nearly everyone at once, and readers who admired the hard honesty of the middle may feel that Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch forgives its people a little too readily. For anyone weighing it as a group read, the novel carries infidelity, heavy drinking, self-harm, mental illness and a threat of violence in a school, all handled seriously rather than sensationally.
Richard Bausch and the Long Apprenticeship
Bausch trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent years teaching at George Mason University in northern Virginia, which may explain how exactly he catches the commuter towns at the foot of the Blue Ridge. He later moved to the University of Memphis and then to Chapman University in California. He is best known as a writer of stories, the winner of the Rea Award for the short story in 2012, and for several editions he has been the editor of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
That background shows. Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch, his tenth novel, often reads like a sequence of linked stories, each scene shaped around a single turn of feeling, and its best chapters could stand on their own.
Final Thoughts
Readers who loved Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler will recognise the territory: a family that keeps trying to sit down together and keeps failing until, almost by accident, it does. Anyone who wants the holiday in a gentler key should pair it with An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, and Suzanne Berne’s The Ghost at the Table makes a sharp companion about sisters and a holiday dinner that will not stay polite.
What lingers from Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch is its sense of an ending larger than any one family’s: the last November of the century, a town braced for a calendar change, and a table of people who have hurt one another sitting down anyway. The book is uneven and too long. Its best pages are wise about the price of staying.