[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt offers positive evaluation of The Dinner Party, though he finds fault in Fast's lack of literary sophistication.]

An old-fashioned Ibsenesque moral drama is what Howard Fast has undertaken in his latest novel, The Dinner Party, about a wealthy liberal United States Senator who is forced to confront his own limitations.

Honoring Aristotle's prescription that a tragedy should occur “within a single circuit of the sun,” The Dinner Party begins with Senator Richard Cromwell waking up on his estate in the suburbs of Washington early in the morning, and ends with his retiring to bed late the same night. Between these moments, a great deal happens.

Cromwell gets up, goes for a run and makes an appointment with his secretary—who is also his mistress—to do some work on a Senate bill he is preparing. His wife, Dolly, sets the household in motion to prepare for an important dinner party to be held that evening, at which the Secretary of State and his assistant are to be the guests of honor. Later in the day, the Senator and his wife reconcile certain differences and make passionate love together for the first time in several years.

The Cromwells' son, Leonard, comes home from Harvard Law School with a black classmate, Clarence Jones, who turns out to be his lover. During a talk the two have together, it becomes apparent that Leonard has AIDS. Later in the day, he will reveal this fact not only to his sister, Elizabeth, who is, of course, devastated by the news, but also to his parents, for whom it becomes the final blow in a series of unhappy events.

Dolly Cromwell's parents, Augustus and Jenny Levi, arrive. Augustus, the billionaire head of an engineering firm (and the source of the Cromwells' affluence), is the point of the coming dinner party. As Augustus tells Senator Cromwell, the Secretary of State wants him to quit work on a road he has contracted to build across Central America, linking the oceans, because the United States won't be guaranteed control of the road.

Later, in the afternoon, the Senator will ask his father-in-law to make a deal with the Secretary of State to stop work on the road only if the Government will protect the rights of refugees seeking sanctuary in American churches from Guatemalan and Salvadoran death squads. Augustus will answer that sympathy and compassion are “not my line. … I don't bleed for anyone, not here, not in Africa, not in Asia. I'm in this to have fun and make money.”

Finally the dinner guests gather. After politely slicing one another up over lamb and Lafite-Rothschild, the women will withdraw and the men will try to come to a meeting of minds. Augustus, out of sheer contempt for the Secretary and his assistant, will reverse himself and try to bargain for his son-in-law's sanctuary deal. The Senator will withdraw and try to comfort his stricken son.

Mr. Fast, writing sparely and trying always to register his points through his plot and his dialogue, succeeds here in dramatizing many of the major moral dilemmas of our age. His after-dinner showdown crackles with tension, and the daylong drama is heightened by the choruslike commentary of the black couple who run the Cromwells' household.

Indeed the polish of the entire exercise raises the question in the reader's mind why it was ever necessary, historically, for drama to evolve from the well-made play. Why shouldn't the eternal questions that the novel grapples with always be treated in the old-fashioned form that Mr. Fast has chosen to cast The Dinner Party in?

Looking at the novel in this light, one begins to wish that Mr. Fast had availed himself of certain modern literary techniques. One wishes, for instance, that he had made use of symbolism, so that the various characters could stand for something more than the mere categories they now seem to represent: blacks, liberals, Jews, women and homosexuals ranged against the brutal and bigoted representatives of the American establishment.

One wishes that Mr. Fast had made use of the techniques of irony and ambiguity so prevalent in modern literature, if only so that the main message of The Dinner Party weren't so blatantly didactic: that the maintenance of the Cold War military economy inevitably obviates such humane priorities as protecting refugees from foreign tyrannies or researching a cure for AIDS.

As crusty old Augustus Levi tells the Secretary of State and his assistant: “You and your mirror image in the Kremlin could have stopped this lunacy years ago, but neither of you had the brains or the guts. There's no way to rectify it now. You've doomed this lovely little planet of ours. Sure we're enemies. You damn fool, it's not communism that's going to destroy us—it's plain, old-fashioned ignorance and stupidity.”

All the same, considering the artistic limitations he has set himself, Mr. Fast has produced a powerful and absorbing drama. If its characters are types, they are richly illustrated ones. And in addition to Cold War politics, it concerns itself with an issue that isn't narrowly ideological, the problem of coming to terms with death in a secular world.

At the end of the book, after Senator Cromwell has gone to bed and wept “for his son and for himself,” we get a final glimpse of the doomed Leonard, alone in his bedroom meditating. “He sat cross-legged on a small round pillow, watching the rise and fall of his breath, listening to the question, Where were you before you were born? For this moment, his fear was gone.”