New Year’s Eve, as described in fiction, is a grim affair

NEW Year’s Eve is a moment of release, when the dry husk of the old year is discarded. Coming so soon after the expensive rituals of Christmas, it can provoke tired cynicism, but people of all ages still embrace the excuse to drown in sentimentality (or alcohol). It is an opportunity for fireworks, countdowns, bad dancing, claustrophobic parties and ropey television, or simply to pass out under a giant pile of coats.

In fiction, New Year’s Eve almost invariably proves a fiasco. Often it is tainted by doom or despair. In George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, it prompts Squire Cass, a minor aristocrat, to host an opulent dance. His son Godfrey’s estranged wife, Molly, travels there, intending to expose his shabby behaviour, only to collapse en route and die in the snow.

It is the date when Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl freezes to death in the street, ignored by revellers, and when the title character in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles weds the dogmatic hypocrite Angel Clare. In Anton Chekhov’s short story The Looking Glass, a young woman falls asleep on New Year’s Eve and perceives a future so haunted by death that, when she wakes, the dream seems to have cast a pall over her whole existence.

Less morbid, though still bleak, is the subgenre of modern novel in which a New Year’s Eve party exposes the fault lines in a marriage or in society at large. Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way features a couple for whom such a celebration becomes an unbearable chapter of “hints, glances, sliding words, oblique smiles, incomprehensible references”.

In Brigid Brophy’s glistening, neglected book The Snow Ball, the hedonism of an end-of-year costume party amplifies the characters’ duplicity as well as their anxiety about it. Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility portrays Katey Kontent, a socialite, making merry at a jazz bar in Greenwich Village, where the prospect of New Year dangles “brightly coloured possibilities”– but also the sour truth that the race to grasp them is a ruthless competition.

Nick McDonell gives the occasion a sharply contemporary spin in Twelve, a portrait of Manhattanites cramped by privilege – one of whom, a drug addict, guns down half his social circle at a New Year’s Eve shindig. It is at a rather less edgy gathering to mark the same holiday that Lila, the bright star of Elena Ferrante’s passionate Neapolitan novels, looks at her neighbours and realises with disgust “how poorly made we are”.

And there is surely no more hapless New Year’s Eve reveller in modern literature than the one Karl Ove Knausgaard pictures in his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family: a teenage plot to hide some cans of beer ahead of the night’s festivities turns into a roiling psychodrama about deceit, failure, rejection and David Bowie.

Since New Year is a time for resolutions, its eve is a final chance to indulge in what is soon to be renounced. But last hurrahs have a way of paralysing the will to make real change. At the beginning of Bridget Jones’s Diary, a comic novel by Helen Fielding, the main character starts the year determined to improve her diet—and “go to gym three times a week not merely to buy sandwich”.

Yet, the remnants of the previous night’s blowout surround her; her good intentions swiftly sink amid a flotsam of cold potatoes and cheese-and-pineapple canapes. It is not long before she is attacking a bar of chocolate the size of a dinner tray.

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Thankfully, there are more auspicious depictions of the holiday in fiction. In Charles Dickens’ story The Chimes, a poor messenger named Toby “Trotty” Veck is mired in gloom, but has an inspiring New Year vision. After years of believing that poverty condemns him to misery, he thinks again.

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth begins with Archie Jones, a war veteran, attempting to gas himself in his car – only for a worker from a nearby butcher’s shop to disturb him. Interpreting this as a cosmic intervention, he drives off and makes eight ecstatic circuits of a roundabout, before blundering into the wreckage of a New Year’s Eve party where he encounters “the most comforting woman he had ever met”.

Sometime, ringing out the old means ringing in the true.

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