Charles McCarry’s The Secret Lovers (1970)

Charles McCarry’s The Secret Lovers (1970)

The picnic in McCarry’s The Secret Lovers, a Cold War spy-versus-spy novel, is a sly allusion to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. When Paul Christopher’s boss David Patchen complains that Impressionists bore him and “Picnics explain nothing,”...
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971)

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971)

The premise of Angle of Repose is that Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver Ward was no picnic. It’s a sad narrative without the pleasures and high spirits of a picnic. According to her grandson Lyman Ward, who writes her life story, Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver...
Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Stugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972)

Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Stugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972)

The Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is somewhere in Canada, where specialists pick through the debris left by careless Extraterrestrial picnickers. There is no picnic.The picnic is a metaphor offered by knowledgeable scientist Valentine Pillman to explain the...
J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Khrishnapur (1973)

J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Khrishnapur (1973)

Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...
John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower (1974)

John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower (1974)

Fowles’s The Ebony Tower is a sendup of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Although a boat is in the background, it is uncertain how Manet’s picnickers arrived for their dejeuner sur l’herbe. Fowles’ version of the picnic is definitive; the...

Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)

Bainbridge’s idea of picnic fun is a biting satire of an English company picnic during which everything that can go awry does, including murder. Two friends, Brendass and Freda, organize a picnic for the employees at an Italian wine and spirits shop on Hope Street in...
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975)

Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975has two picnics fifty years apart. The narrative concerns the lives of two unfulfilled English women in Satipur, a town amidst the heat and dust of the plains in Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. In 1923, Olivia Rivers visits...
Martin Amis’s Dead Babies (1975)

Martin Amis’s Dead Babies (1975)

Appleseed Rectory is the site of Amis’s relentlessly unpleasant picnic that defiantly upends expectations. * The picnic is Quentin’s idea of fun for his guests, a free-wheeling and animated by alcohol and drugs. He says to his wife Celia, “I thought...
William Steig’s Abel’s Island (1976)

William Steig’s Abel’s Island (1976)

Steig’s juvenile novel Abel’s Island (1976) is a Robinsonade, the adventure of Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint a mouse stranded for a year on an island in a river. Like Robinson Crusoe, Abel manages to live off the land and returns to his former life chastened but...