It has been observed that luck is the residue of design. A fair re-engineering of that fundamental application of logic that is applicable here might be that the design of Dinner Along the Amazon is the residue of war. “War” is the title of the second entry in this collection of short stories which the author himself confesses in the Introduction are arranged in chronological order according to publication. The significance of configuration is that the stories are not constructed according to any imposition of desired thematic design. The linear progression from one to the next means that any perceived thematic contextuality linking one to the next is entirely the result of historical happenstance.
The residue of the author’s immersion in the psychological consequences of the act of war permeates the text, but if one were to create a chart graphing each incidence of the actual word “war” it would resemble more than anything a medical readout showing a basic underlying rhythm punctuated by intermittent periods of intensity. What is somewhat fascinating is the first appearance of the word “war” does not occur until more than fifty pages into the book and yet that appearance is in the opening story. The intensity of recurrence obviously reaches its peak activity over the course of the story titled “War.” Notably, however, the recurrence only comes to a stop ten pages shy of the book’s ending. The result being that event though World War II is technically only the subject of a single entry in Dinner Along the Amazon and despite the stories contained within being there only as the result of their place in the author’s chronology of creation, the design of the book is powered by the presence of war as a thematic engine.
The opening story of the collection is “Lemonade” and if it can be termed a war story, then the war must be explained as that of a young boy engaged in a battle simply to be noticed by his neglectful mother. “Sometime—Later—Not Now” is a fairly long story that represents just a blip on the readout charge of references to war, but it is the reference itself that draws attention to the blip. The first person narrator opens the story by description how he and the as-yet-unknown Diana are over thirty-years-old in 1950 and how that world of 1950 “had been secured for us by a World War that closed in a parable of Silence.” Before the story is two pages done, the reader has also learned that their fathers fought in the war, survived, and both return to normal civilian life. And from that point, World War Two is never directly mentioned again.
Dinner Along the Amazon consistently and persistently presents its various characters engage in a multiplicity of situations as living a world that can be starkly divided into, as the narrator of “Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye” puts it, lives that “were lived before the war, before the war that was known as `the war’” and the lives that are being lived after it. So deeply has the consequences of “the war” impacted these characters that narrative events which have nothing to do with actual war in any real sense are very often described in metaphorical terms situating the conflict therein as military engagements. In 1977, Findley published a novel titled The Wars that is actually about World War I, but the 1984 collection Dinner Along the Amazon at times seem to be a thematic sequel of sorts to that book. It is rarely described as such, but close scrutiny reveals that at some intangible level, Dinner Along the Amazon qualifies as a collection of war stories.
