November's final Thursday is rarely a reason for rejoicing in American fiction, although authors may have been quietly grateful to their Puritan ancestors for the opportunities Thanksgiving presents for depicting unravelling families, public rows and cooking crises. Not to mention sour comedy, as in Scott Fitzgerald's leftover turkey recipes in The Crack-Up.
In Anne Tyler's A Patchwork Planet, the problem is a missing turkey (and one too many pumpkin pies). In Jay McInerney's Model Behaviour, it's parents who turn up for a restaurant meal with the protagonist in Manhattan, where his drunken dad behaves monstrously. Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, set over a Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, sees two families imploding as the kids' and parents' sins and lies are exposed during the eponymous storm. But shunning your kinsfolk is just as bleak in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which shows loathsome lecturer Chip shopping for one on the November holiday after being dumped by his student girlfriend.
Two recent novels derive their structure from the build-up to the supper. In Suzanne Berne's The Ghost at the Table, sisters squabble over their childhood years, while in Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land his hero Frank Bascombe prepares for the various challenges presented by his two ex-wives and children, and meanwhile experiences setbacks, ranging from George W Bush's election victory to being shot at.
In modern Thanksgiving fiction (as in Thanksgiving movies), in short, what the reader is invited to give thanks for is not belonging to families like these: if you're looking for Dickensian warmth and wholesomeness, you'll need to go back to Louisa May Alcott's story, "An Old-Fashioned Thanks-giving". And even that has a title suggesting that, in 1881, the celebratory meal was already prone to go pear-shaped.
