Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986)

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)

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)

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)

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...
E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate (1989)

E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate (1989)

A picnic in the woods is a novelty for Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old New York City boy who has never walked on anything but pavement. So, when Drew Preston, a worldly woman of twenty-one, says,” Let’s go for a picnic….” Billy is flummoxed. He...
Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)

Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)

Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is about Cuban immigrants in the 1950s. Music and food sometimes blend, and at a hotel club, there are platters of roast suckling pig, rice and beans, and a chocolate-éclair cake drenched in honey. But for a...
Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)

Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)

Animal Dreams describes a celebration of All Souls’ Day in Grace, Arizona. The cemetery is on a hill above the town. Once there, the graves are cleaned and decorated, after which the family enjoys a picnic. The protagonist Codi says, “We were a harvester-ant clan...
A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (1992)

A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (1992)

The Midsummer’s Day picnic is ruined when flying ants fall into the strawberries, cucumber sandwiches, and silver cream jugs. Everyone runs for cover. Belying the humor,  the dying ants in e cream jugs and teacups, is Byatt’s metaphor contrasting the...
Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County (1992)

Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County (1992)

Waller’s sudsy  Bridges of Madison County does not include a picnic. But Clint Eastwood’s film does. Francesca (Meryl Streep) and Kincaid (Clint Eastwood) enjoy a romantic picnic by Roseman Bridge. Featured Image: The bridge is in the background. Clint Eastwood. See...