SOURCE: A review of The Dinner Party, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 22, 1987, p. 6.

In the following review, Savage offers negative assessment of The Dinner Party.

A Washington dinner party could make for a good novel. Politicians are calculators, and the best of them know how the figures will come out before all the numbers are punched in. An ostensibly social occasion—a dinner or a reception—is among the best places to watch a politician at work. He seeks information, asks what others think about an issue, tries out an argument on one side—analyzing, calculating. Put another politician there too, and you might want to listen in.

But not at a dinner party created by Howard Fast. Rather than ideas, issues, names and witticisms, you get a couple of college kids sounding off about Buddhism and meditation—reverberations of the worst of the 1960s. “I...