Black Tie Affair By Ken Atri Summary

The novel, Black Tie Affair, by Ken Atri, conveys a story about the life experiences of Robert Davenport. Robert runs a club named Club Zyanya, and he is married to Jennifer, who nags and abuses him emotionally on a regular basis. She seizes every opportunity to put her husband down until one day Robert decides that it’s time to move on and rebuild his life. Luckily, he has friends, who are like siblings to him. They are caring and loyal. Being surrounded with such dear people, living apart from Jennifer, and seeking solace in alcohol incessantly, will he be able to achieve his desired success and happiness?

Exploring the themes of the beauty of friendship, love, and loyalty, this fiction accentuates the extent of what one can achieve when he is with the right crowd. Without mincing words, this story tells how a good marriage brings out the best in a couple and how a bad one can mar them, even their kids. It makes visible how children suffer the most when they are neglected and displaced due to a bitter divorce, and it also shows how some divorced, single parents have to sacrifice so much to minimize damage.
There are skimpy details of events and characters, and this made the text less fluid and engaging. Moreover, the dialogues are few and dry. All the characters talk the same way. Written from the third person point of view, the narration keeps going back and forth, and there are ceaseless repetitions of facts. Several characters died at different times from illness, and I was uncomfortable with the number of deaths of loved ones. For certain, this is not a tale for readers that get uneasy reading about much morbid