Macbeth's was perhaps the most memorable, but from the time of Hrothgar's, which lasted several nights, to the time of Gatsby's, which went on till dawn, the disastrous dinner party has been as much a cliché of dramatic and narrative literature as it is an unfortunate fact of social life. I suppose the fictional violation of our most amiable ritual serves to emphasize the horrors of less amiable impulses, as the son is served up in a ragout, the warming-cover lifted to reveal the severed head or the pet budgerigar.

More frequently still, disaster at the table is merely funny, a forceful image of our ineptness as social beings…. We know, before it appears, the destination of the banana cream pie. Nor are we surprised, in Beryl Bainbridge's Injury Time, to find the chops overdone and the dessert, in-side a plastic bag, fallen behind the fridge. She has...