Monday, December 24, 2012

The ten best Christmas lunches

At the Observer, Tim Lewis came up with the ten best Christmas lunches from stage, screen, and literature, including:
The Corrections (2001)

Enid, the matriarch of the Lambert family in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, does not want much: just to bring the unravelling clan together for “one last Christmas” in St Jude, the midwestern town where they grew up. “Does that sound like it might be fun to you?” she asks her daughter, Denise, now a chef in Philadelphia. From the start, it seems a doomed endeavour. The wife of Gary, the eldest son, refuses to go; Chip, the middle son, is in Lithuania and doesn’t want to attend either. And when they do reunite in St Jude, the children have no choice but to confront their father’s accelerating dementia.
Read about the other entries on the list.

The Corrections is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best episodes of drunkenness in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue