What's For Dinner? is a comedy of manners all about alcoholism, insanity, adultery, drugs, moderate incest, and death. I mean it is all about how its characters talk to each other while what would be these big novelistic events of their lives take place: they say things like "What's for dinner?" Also they do talk about feeling enraged or crazed or sexy. They also get to talk about their furniture and their bridge games and the rainbow in the water pitcher. Someone's tennis-shoes problem and the medication problem of a someone else in the nuthouse seem to take up about the same space of talk. The book really is mostly conversation; a room or a chair may be described, and as beautifully as if it inhabited one of Mr. Schuyler's poems, but no one's mental interior is ever presented to us apart from that person's talk. This method...