How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2007

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Symbols & Motifs

Music

Gaiman’s story is set in 1970s London during “the early days of punk” (Paragraph 29). This music is what Vic and Enn normally listen to. They tell the girls at the party that during their time as exchange students they had listened to Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” The song, Enn says, “had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold” (Paragraph 29). The line portrays the search within and without to find goodness. The line also suggests travel, mirroring the girls at the party, who have traveled as tourists to Earth.

When Enn arrives at the party, he says, “The music playing in that front room wasn’t anything I recognized” (Paragraph 30). His description of the music creates an otherworldly, ethereal mood: “It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I’d been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop” (Paragraph 31). Later, Enn notices there are no record players or speakers, and he wonders where the music comes from. He calls the music “unfamiliar” once more while talking to Triolet.

After Triolet whispers her poem to Enn, however, the music begins to make sense to him. He says, “For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs being played in the front room” (Paragraph 120). Triolet’s words reorganized him so that this foreign place, filled with foreign girls, became graspable, making the music symbolic of Enn’s transformation.

The House

From the moment the boys enter the house, Enn is disoriented. He says, “The house was deeper than it looked, larger and more complex than the two-up two-down model I had imagined” (Paragraph 35). The house’s structure is more complicated than it had seemed, reflecting Enn’s insecurity around girls. Just as the house seems easy to get lost in, Enn feels lost in his communication with the girls at the party. He adds, the “rooms were underlit—I doubt there was a bulb of more than 40 watts in the building” (Paragraph 35), representing how shadowy and mysterious girls seem to Enn.

Enn refers to kitchens early in the story as the room at a party where he often ends up “listening to somebody’s mum going on about politics or poetry or something” (Paragraph 6). Kitchens represent his insecurity and his failure at connecting with girls. They also represent comfort. He notes, “Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn’t see any signs of someone’s mum” (Paragraph 88). Here, he has something obvious to do, such as to pour himself or a girl a drink.

The upstairs, by contrast, represents what feels unreachable to Enn. Vic and Stella go upstairs, presumably to fool around, and Enn says he wonders “about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt” (Paragraph 105). Whatever happens upstairs feels out of reach to Enn. When he sees Stella’s face at the top of the stairs as he and Vic leave, Enn compares her eyes to an entire universe, something enigmatic and unknown.

Triolet’s Name

A triolet is a complicated poetic form that has eight lines. It has two rhymes, with the first, fourth, and seventh lines rhyming and then the second line rhyming with the eighth. The triolet originated in France in the 13th century, and it was meant to convey humorous ideas that were also serious in meaning—much like Gaiman’s story. Triolet, the character, says that she is a verse form. She tells Enn that her people expressed themselves in a poem. This poem was then sent out through the universe to be discovered by people on a distant planet. She says the poem “colonized” a new race of people, and then she whispers the poem to Enn. He says, “I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me” (Paragraph 115), suggesting the poem has begun to infect him as well.

Other characters’ names also have meaning. Enn is an adverb that means “yet” or “still,” suggesting Enn is on the brink of becoming someone new. At the beginning of the story, he knows little about girls, but by the end, he understands clearly who the girls at the party were. Triolet’s poem transformed his understanding of the world. Vic may stand for “victory” or “victor,” a name that expresses who Vic appears to be at the beginning of the story. By the end of the story, however, his name seems ironic, as he feels insecure and scared because of his experience with Stella.