The Din of Dinner

Conversational clutter makes it tough to get to the meat of the matter.

By Shinan Govani

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Vastly entertaining, scarily well scripted and horri­­fi­cally funny. No, I’m not talking about an Ian Rankin book. Rather, I’m talking about an Ian Rankin dinner. The charming author of Scottish provenance – famous for his Inspector Rebus novels, known in all the airports in all the lands – hit Canada not long ago and then hit my elbow at least twice when I sat beside him at a small-scale sup.

Book launches have been around as long as the chattering classes have chattered. But unlike the literary bashes of yesterday, where the booze seemed to be boozier and there were more punch-ups – like the time Norman Mailer famously knocked Gore Vidal in the mouth – today’s launches are much more polite affairs, where the only jousting that occurs is verbal. Instead of bloodshed, it’s one big love-in.

Consider the scene at this dinner, held at Toronto’s Dora Keogh in a dainty, private room that looks like the kitchen in The Bridges of Madison County. Let’s go around the table and tell Ian, the man for whom crime does pay, why we like his books. Such was the opening instruction from that blithe bookish spirit, Kim McArthur, who publishes Rankin in Canada.

As the author with the Oasis-style haircut squirmed and told me under his breath that he was “embarrassed,” off we went, one by one. Some played it not hard to get, as in the case of the woman who declared that she was one of Rankin’s top 10 fans in the whole wide world. Others tried a slyer sort of flattery, such as the man in the Woody Allen specs who said that he had never read detective fiction before Rankin but was now definitely sold. Yet another guest tried some reverse form of seduction, telling the novelist that she had, in fact, never read him at all (she only reads magazines) and that she was “saving him.”

Yes, that old trick. The whole thing was aggrandized by the fact that we were all flaunting our smarts not just for the guest of honour but for each other.

The desire to impress manifests itself in myriad ways, but nowhere does it arise as consistently as at an egghead gathering of this kind. Whether the discussion consists of a mystery writer’s strong points or democracy in Pakistan, the clamour of so many arch opinions and fancy suppositions can often be like too much cholesterol clogging the system. (In that way, eggheads are similar to, well, eggs.)

The same highbrow psychodrama plays out vividly at the Grano Speaker Series, a program of invite-only dinner and lecture events that occur regularly in Toronto. Society mucky-mucks, mixing with media mandarins and government bigwigs, come out to fork fusilli and listen to the likes of British-American atheist Christopher Hitchens and French scholar Bernard-Henri Lévy. And the comic-tragic theatre often doesn’t come from the marquee intellectual but from the salonistas themselves, arriving pressed and pumped to impress.

You see, when eggheads get a little over-clever, meaningful conversation gets buried under too many fancy hors d’oeuvres. Voicing one’s own honest opinion can feel like a risky affair, which is why many opt instead to cite an opinion they read recently, say, in the weekend paper. But this may be even riskier: At that same Grano dinner, I was seated beside canny Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, when I found myself quoting an opinion (this time, about Conrad Black) that she had first written!

Later that evening, I gleefully took in firecracker Camille Paglia’s dire take on Hillary Clinton. Dumping all over the would-be first female prez, the pundit said of her, “There’s an over-clever, over-conceptualized political personality there who has trouble being an ordinary person."

But at that point, I forgot whether she was talking about poor Hillary or the rest of us.

Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl.

sgovani@enroutemag.net

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