The Assembled Parties

You would love the apartment—it’s like the sets of those plays you love, with the “breezy dialogue”. They sort of talk that way and everybody’s unbelievably nice and, like, gracious and happy. It’s like you go to New York and you look for New York but it isn’t there? But it’s here…

Former movie star Julie Bascov insists on taking Christmas seriously—despite her family’s reminders that that they are in fact Jewish.

Every year, she and her impossibly well-heeled husband Ben host a feast in their palatial apartment on Central Park West.

In December 1980, their son and his best friend Jeff come down from Harvard to join the party, and Jeff is dazzled by the Bascov clan.

But when he returns for the same occasion twenty years later, he finds that much that was sown in 1980 has been reaped in the intervening years…