Isabel Colgate’s The Shooting Party (1980)

Colgate’s The Shooting Party is a snapshot of English gentry circa October 1913 when Sir Randolph and Minnie Nettleby, the lord and lady of the manor, host one of their traditional fall shooting parties. A halt accompanies it on the hunt or midday break for luncheon....

John Varley’s Picnic on the Nearside (1980)

Included in Varley’s “Picnic on the Nearside is a romantic picnic on the Moon. Fox Carnival Joule and Halo are pals. But their relationship is altered when Halo changes into a woman with full breasts, curves, “the works,” etc. To avoid the sexual...

Margaret Gordon’s Wilberforce Goes on a Picnic (1982)

Picnic is the euphemism for a daylong eating orgy in Gordon’s Wilberforce Goes on a Picnic (1982). It’s the story of obese bears and a goat, who collectively devour mounds of hamburgers on rolls, sandwiches, a jar of catsup, a bowl heaped with mashed...

William Trevor’s “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” (1982)

Transforming the popular children’s song “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” into a death picnic is Trevor’s metaphor for portraying the 1980s generation as infantile and short on morality. Six months into their marriage, Edwin, a twenty-nine-year-old...

Laurie Colwin ‘s Family Happiness (1982)

Colwin’s is a New York-based novel about Polly [Dora] Solo-Miller Demarest, married to Henry Demarest, an affluent, Jewish East Manhattan husband she loves, and Lincoln Bennett, an artist who lives in Lower Manhattan. Polly finds family happiness by leading two lives,...

Charles McCarry’s The Last Supper (1983)

When picnics are portrayed as unhappy, the contrast is purposeful. Charles McCarry’s picnic nightmare intends to provide a metaphor for the life of Paul Christopher, a Cold War CIA spy still struggling to find his mother, Lori, who was abducted by the Nazis in 1939....

Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986)

Juan Gris’s Woman with a Basket is the dust jacket for the 1st edition of The Garden of Eden. Gris was among Hemingway’s favorite painters, and Patrick Hemingway thought this work expressed his father’s narrative’s “somber...

Paul Theroux’s O-Zone (1986)

Theroux’s O-Zone New Year’s Eve ranks among the most disagreeable and uncomfortable picnics. Eight picnickers have gathered in the O-Zone or Outer Zone, once Arkansas and Missouri, now in 2036, a vast ecological disaster area. Encased in self-contained...

H.E. Bates’s A Month by the Lake (1987)

Though billed as a comedy of errors, for all that happens in Bates’s “A Month by the Lake,” the lake might as well be Lake Coma. There is, however, a Bates a lovely picnic in the summer of 1937, enhancing the slow-paced relationship of the...

Randal Kleiser’s Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Among the silly escapades in Big Top Pee-wee is Pee-Wee’s klutzy relationship with his financé Winnie Johnson. Every day, Pee-wee and Winnie meet for a lunchtime picnic, for which she makes egg salad sandwiches that Pee-wee hates.   Pee-wee endures this because...