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...
John Fowles’s Daniel Martin (1977)

John Fowles’s Daniel Martin (1977)

Fowles’s notion of wrecking pleasure is an aborted picnic on the River Cherwell. Daniel Martin and Jane Mallory, two Oxford undergraduates, set out for a pleasant outing. It’s intended as an innocent date because Daniel is dating Mallory’s sister...
Olivia Manning’s The Battle Lost and Won (1978)

Olivia Manning’s The Battle Lost and Won (1978)

Simon Boulderstone, a British lieutenant, serving during the North African campaign, is among the major characters of Manning’s The Battle Lost and Won. Cutting short a leave, Boulderstone wanders, trying to regain his unit and rejoin the fighting against Rommel at El...
Günter Grass’s The Flounder (1977)

Günter Grass’s The Flounder (1977)

Grass’s picnic in The Flounder is among the worst. Not only does he mock the accepted idea of a picnic, but he turns it topsy-turvy.  It’s an ugly episode in which Sybille, aka Billie, is a variation of the Greek oracle/prophetess Sybil. According to Grass’ version,...
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979)

William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979)

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is where Sophie Zawistowska is sometimes picnicked. Stingo, the narrator, associates Sophie’s park outings as one of Watteau and Fragonard a fête champêtres. He supposes that it was a “pleasant game” for Sophie to buy...