This Cake Is for the Party, by Sarah Selecky

Though I can’t get enough of the stuff in real life, there’s something about cake in literary fiction that never fails to make me feel a little nauseous with dread (in real life, the nausea comes from having had too much cake). I think it started with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, when Mrs. Brown decides to make the perfect birthday cake for her husband. I can’t resist quoting this brilliant novel:

“She is going to produce a birthday cake — only a cake — but in her mind at this moment the cake is glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine; it is better, even, than the photographs of cakes in magazines. She imagines making, out of the humblest materials, a cake with all the balance and authority of an urn or a house. The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety.”

This fragile concoction of flour and sugar is of course a symbol for Mrs. Brown’s desire to be a good wife and mother, and the reader senses the cake will turn out no better than Mrs. Brown’s attempts at embracing domesticity. Of course, the poor cake cannot live up to her expectations of icing-topped splendor:

“It has not turned out the way she pictured it; no, not at all. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but she’d imagined something more. She’d imagined it larger, more remarkable. She’d hoped (she admits to herself) it would look more lush and beautiful, more wonderful. This cake she’s produced feels mall. It looks amateurish homemade. She tells herself, It’s fine.”

The looming spectre of the perfect cake returned to me earlier this year as I read Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault, when Clara, a woman who will discover the road to hell is paved with good intentions, makes a twelve layer chocolate torte for a party, only to have it accidentally dropped on the floor before it can be eaten. Like Clara’s designs on a happy future with her temporary wards, this whipped cream fantasy was not meant to be.

All to say, I approached This Cake Is for the Party with caution. The brilliant cover encouraged me it was wise to do so, for the gorgeous cake plate is broken (though at least the cake is eaten for once). And as foreboding as it’s come to be, cake is the perfect metaphor for this collection that explores life’s disappointments, writ large in moments as seemingly inconsequential as homemade pastry.

These are stories about the insecurities of relationships, adultery, failed businesses and loneliness, attempts at self-improvement through high-end supplements that may be just another pyramid scheme. The characters, though different in every story, are wracked by their own insecurities even as they try to appear to the contrary. They rationalize and substitute in an attempt to fill absences too large to overlook. They are stories of loss — of friends, parents, but above all, of dreams.

For example, in the first story, “Throwing Cotton,” (which is likely my favourite in the collection), the title points to the substitutions in play. One friend thinks the expression is “throwing cotton to the wind,” which still kind of make sense, but we know isn’t quite right. We see other inadequate exchanges at work: a husband for someone else’s husband, a dog for a baby.

Some of these people are quite broken as the plate on the cover, others merely cracked, and yet Selecky has made something incredibly beautiful out of these shattered remains. In “One Thousand Wax Buddhas” an artist stumbles upon his partner’s new artistic creation made by smashing all the breakable things in the room, and rearranging them into a new sculpture. He notes:

“Eventually, I saw that she was right. It was more than a mess. It was beautiful. Sure, I was frightened when I saw it at first, but that was only because I was attached to all the things when they were in their unbroken form. When I was able to see what she’d done, when she showed me how to look, I could see it. The broken things were just things. She’d created something else. It was like one of her signs. It pointed to something far beyond things.”

Selecky is an incredibly economical writer, the words pared down until only the most vital remain, and her writing packs a huge punch. The dialogue is almost ruthless, stripping bare the strained relationships between the characters, and elevated by the subtlest of physical cues like shared laughter over a glass. She has a knack for selecting the perfect image, like, for example, some prawns at the end of “This is How We Grow as Humans,” a story about a two former friends who have had serious relationships with the same man. After a civilized-yet-scathing lunch conversation with her former friend, the protagonist comes home to dinner preparations and observes: “The raw prawns in the bowl look like they’re melting into each other. They don’t even look like they used to be alive. They could be anything.” This kind of loaded writing imbues each story with a visceral tension, one that grows in the pit of your belly, and takes a while to dissipate after reading. Pace yourself, not only because these masterful stories deserve to be savoured, but because small bites will make the emotional impact much easier to digest.

This short story collection came highly recommended to me by my bookish partner-in-crime Erin Balser, who casts a professional’s critical eye on all she reads, so I started reading with high expectations. But I’m happy to say that for once, cake didn’t lead to disappointment.