26 pages • 52 minutes read
Neil GaimanHow to Talk to Girls at Parties
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Understanding Others
At the beginning of the story, Enn is uncomfortable and anxious around girls. They are enigmatic to him. He feels he only understands boys, and yet he wants to interact with the opposite sex. He says, “[W]hen you start out as kids you’re just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you’re all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there’s a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you” (Paragraph 19). He no longer understands girls now that they’re adolescents. They seem like aliens.
Vic is the opposite of Enn in that he feels quite confident with girls. Enn notes that, at every party, Vic is “off snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and I’ll be in the kitchen listening to somebody’s mum going on about politics or poetry or something” (Paragraph 6). He envies Vic’s confidence and experience. Vic tells him throughout the story that he only needs to talk to girls if he wants them to talk to him.
Once at the party, Enn tries to take Vic’s advice. With the first two girls he approaches, he does his best to talk. From his first interaction with Wain’s Wain, however, the girls speak in ways that are incomprehensible to him. He says of Wain’s Wain, “I had no idea what she was talking about” (Paragraph 48). She shares stories of her journeys but says many things that make no sense, such as her references to “Hola Colt.” Enn attempts to talk to her as though she were saying something ordinary; he asks her to dance, but she refuses. The second, unnamed girl talks about her discomfort with being inside a human body, which she refers to as “a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium” (Paragraph 67). She adds, “But knowledge is there, in the meat” and “I am resolved to learn from it” (Paragraph 68). Enn continues to focus on her appearance rather than her words. He says, “She wasn’t the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway” (Paragraph 70). In his mind, she’s just “a girl” with whom he can have some experience, and he puts his arm around her.
Once Vic tells Enn he should listen as well as talk, Enn’s understanding begins to change. His interaction with Triolet is the first one in which he tries to engage in conversation. When she tells him she’s a “verse form,” he asks her to clarify what she means, and he continues to ask questions about the odd things she says. She tells him her poem, and he listens. Earlier, she said, “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you” (Paragraph 108), and indeed, hearing her poem changes Enn. When Vic shakes Enn, the narrator says he “began to come back from a thousand miles away” (Paragraph 118). Suddenly, Enn can understand the music, which before was unrecognizable. When he sees Stella’s angry face as he and Vic leave the party, he sees her for who she is. As the story ends, Vic has now lost his confidence. He even loses his words, unable to finish anything he starts to say. Enn, on the other hand, feels he understands something about life, although he is uncertain what it is.
Appearance Versus Reality
Most things in “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” including the title, are not what they appear. The title makes it seem the story will provide instruction for what to say to girls at parties, and the reader assumes that the beings Vic and Enn will interact with at the party will be girls. Neither is true. By the end of the story, even Vic and Enn are not who they thought they were. The people who appear to be girls at the party are not human. This fact becomes obvious as they speak about their travels. Throughout the story, almost nothing is as it seems. Even the house is not what Enn assumed based on its exterior. Instead, he says, it is “larger and more complex” (Paragraph 35). The music, too, is unrecognizable.
Enn focuses on the girls’ appearances from the moment they enter the party. Every description begins with their hair and faces. Stella has “golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful” (Paragraph 25). The girls in the kitchen “had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes” (Paragraph 33). Wain’s Wain’s “hair was so fair it was white, and long, and straight” (Paragraph 36). Enn noticed “She wore a low-cut silvery top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts” (Paragraph 40). The Unnamed Girl “had dark hair, cut short and spiky” (Paragraph 58). Triolet’s “hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets” (Paragraph 91). The truth of who the girls are is revealed not in their appearances, however, but in the things they say. They tell stories that reveal they traveled from other planets, but Enn doesn’t catch on, although he sees there is something odd about them:
[A]ll of the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy (Paragraph 84).
He sees that their beauty is based on something deep inside them. Instead of listening to them, however, he focuses on trying to get physically intimate with them.
Enn finally grasps who they are when he sees Stella at the top of the stairs as he and Vic leave. Although he can’t grasp the totality of who or what she is, he sees she is not just a girl. He compares her eyes to an entire universe. Vic has also seen the reality of who or what she is, but it has horrified and upset him. Both boys come to understand who they are, as well, through seeing the reality of Stella. Vic appeared to be a confident, strong ladies’ man, but by the end, Enn reveals, he “was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy” (Paragraph 134). Beneath his cocksure exterior is a scared boy. Enn, by contrast, had been unsure and uncertain through much of the story, but he now knows something through the poem Triolet whispered in his ear. Girls were a mystery, but by the end of the story, he has gained a profound and mysterious knowledge.
Gender Stereotypes and Expectations
Gaiman’s work often addresses gender stereotypes, and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” is a strong example of this interest. Vic encourages Enn to join his enthusiasm about “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (Paragraph 3), but Enn doesn’t have the confidence Vic does. He envies Vic, who, he says, “seemed to have many girlfriends” (Paragraph 4). Stereotypically, males are judged by how much physical experience they have had with females, and this stereotype implies that girls are objects to be used for male pleasure. Vic’s advice to simply talk to girls is self-serving. It is a means not to get to know them but to gain physical intimacy. When they meet Stella at the party, Vic tells her that her name “had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard” (Paragraph 27). Enn knows Vic says it only to get close to her and that he didn’t mean it.
Vic immediately claims Stella. He keeps his arm around her in a proprietary way, seeming to believe that boys get to be in charge of girls and their bodies. Enn reports that she now “was Vic’s.” Meanwhile, Enn objectifies the girls he meets, focusing on their looks and judging them by how pretty they are. Stella is the prettiest girl there. Two girls in the kitchen are “out of [his] league” (Paragraph 33). Rather than listen to Wain’s Wain, he notices her top and, he says, “tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts” (Paragraph 40). Enn says of the Unnamed Girl, “She wasn’t the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway” (Paragraph 70). What matters are her looks and that she is a girl with whom he might have physical experiences. When Enn thinks about the likelihood that Vic is in a bedroom with Stella, he says, he “envied Vic so much it almost hurt” (Paragraph 105).
The stereotypical relationship between boys and girls begins to shift when Enn meets Triolet. He hears her voice before seeing her, and for the first time that night, he listens to what a girl says. When he describes her looks, he compares her appearance to Antigone’s mask, referring to the ancient Greek play Antigone, which explores power relations between men and women, and features a female lead who shows strength in the face of male authority. When Triolet kisses Enn, “she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own” (Paragraph 113). The gendered power roles are changing. Vic angrily pulls Enn from the party when he experiences that power shift in a bigger way. While the reader never learns what he experienced in the upstairs bedroom, we know it upset and changed him. He vomits, and he can’t name what happened. Seemingly, he found out Stella was not human, as the girls are likely aliens.
Words Create Worlds
The theory of linguistic relativity suggests that much of what we think and feel is shaped by language, and Gaiman weaves this idea throughout “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” Triolet asks Enn, “[W]here does contagion end and art begin?” (Paragraph 111), a rhetorical question that contains the idea that words shape who we are and how we think. Words infect us, she suggests, shaping our experiences and perceptions. She tells Enn the story of how her race of people created a poem “to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for” (Paragraph 106). She adds, “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you” (Paragraph 108). This is indeed what happens when she whispers her poem to Enn. The poem begins to “colonize him,” as she says, changing his perceptions and thoughts, leading him to understand better the world of the girls at the party.
Before hearing her poem, Enn did not understand girls. He says of himself and Vic, “It would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys” (Paragraph 4). He doesn’t know how to get to know girls. Vic tells him more than once that he just needs to talk to them. The first girl he speaks with, though, baffles him. When she says her name, he hears “Wain’s Wain” or, he says, “something that sounded like it” (Paragraph 42). A little later he admits that “I had no idea what she was talking about” (Paragraph 48). The house is “larger and more complex” than Enn had imagined (Paragraph 35), and he finds the music unrecognizable. It isn’t until he meets Triolet that he understands the girls’ world through her poem. After she whispers it to Enn, he says, “For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs being played in the front room” (Paragraph 120), and he sees that Stella is more than just a beautiful girl—she is an entire universe.
Vic, on the other hand, started by believing he understood girls, but this belief is shaken by his experience with Stella. He has no words for the encounter. He says only, “She wasn’t a—” and stops (Paragraph 129). He doesn’t understand who or what she is. When he tries to explain to Enn what happened, his dialogue is filled with ellipses. He doesn’t have words to describe what he experienced because it exists outside his comprehension.
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