A Somewhat Different Cuckoo’s Nest: James Schuyler’s What’s for Dinner?

The recent publication of the long-awaited biography of the poet James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other (2025), has renewed interest in this sometimes overlooked member of the New York school. This is a good opportunity to remind readers of Schuyler’s novel What’s for Dinner? Written the same year and published less than three years after the premiere of Miloš Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, What’s for Dinner? may be read as an ironically provocative response to Ken Kesey’s angry indictment of “the juggernaut of modern matriarchy”. Indeed, I will argue that throughout his novel Schuyler is countering Nest’s harmful clichés about gender with a mocking, queer smile. But there are other reasons why What’s for Dinner deserves attention. First of all, with its focus on dialogue and in the way it utilizes the clichéd language of soap operas, radio and gossip columns, Schuyler’s novel is a curious experiment in narrative technique. And second, inasmuch as What’s for Dinner?’s main topic is the everyday, the quotidian, it may serve as a key to certain aspects of Schuyler’s poetic endeavor.