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Title: Delicious! A Novel by Ruth Reichl
Details: Copyright 2014, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Ruth Reichl is a born storyteller. Through her restaurant reviews, where she celebrated the pleasures of a well-made meal, and her bestselling memoirs that address our universal feelings of love and loss, Reichl has achieved a special place in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, with this magical debut novel, she has created a sumptuous, wholly realized world that will enchant you.
Billie Breslin has traveled far from her home in California to take a job at Delicious!, New York’s most iconic food magazine. Away from her family, particularly her older sister, Genie, Billie feels like a fish out of water—until she is welcomed by the magazine’s colorful staff. She is also seduced by the vibrant downtown food scene, especially by Fontanari’s, the famous Italian food shop where she works on weekends. Then Delicious! is abruptly shut down, but Billie agrees to stay on in the empty office, maintaining the hotline for reader complaints in order to pay her bills.
To Billie’s surprise, the lonely job becomes the portal to a miraculous discovery. In a hidden room in the magazine’s library, Billie finds a cache of letters written during World War II by Lulu Swan, a plucky twelve-year-old, to the legendary chef James Beard. Lulu’s letters provide Billie with a richer understanding of history, and a feeling of deep connection to the young writer whose courage in the face of hardship inspires Billie to comes to terms with her fears, her big sister and her ability to open her heart to love."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've mentioned before how food seems to play a big role in magical realism, one of my favorite genres. In hunting down magical realism books, however, I hunted down some that are about food, but not magical realism. Oh, well. Anyway! This is one of those books.
How I Liked It: You're at a party. The music is ridiculous, the place is laughable (and not in a good way), the food is hit and miss (mostly miss), and the company leaves much to be deserved. Still, you're having a great time! Yes, it's another party metaphor. Yes, you'll get it by the time I'm done.
But first! Meet Wilhelmina "Billie" Breslin, born and raised in Santa Barbara, but recently transplanted to New York City to work at a prestigious food magazine in the early 2010s. We know she's got some mysteries and secrets in her past, particularly involving her sister, as she fights off a panic attack when asked to cook something as part of her interview with the magazine. She also has a policy of not cooking, period. But why?
She turns out to be a dazzlingly quick study and rare talent and gets the job with flying colors, including impressing a prestigious local deli owner (and big fan of cops-- we'll get into that) Sal of Fontanari's and his proprietor-wife Rosalie, apparently part of the magazine interview process. Billie starts working for them as well and manages to land her first piece in the magazine about Sal's place, including a mysterious but hunky customer who Sal affectionately calls "Mr Complainer" for his sophisticated food tastes and love of affectionate bickering with Sal. Billie enjoys her coworkers at the magazine, or at least most of them, including Sammy, a foppish foodie veteran who becomes a dear friend.
Things are mostly fun until the magazine, nearly a hundred years old, abruptly is shut down almost overnight by its awful publisher (see: cartoon cruelty) and all are forced out of a job (apparently there will be absolutely no online presence at all? Shhhh, just go with it), save for Billie, who will stay on to honor the magazine's tradition of dealing with incompetent customers complaining about the recipes. While doing so, Billie bonds with a particularly incompetent customer who becomes a regular, but also gets rare access to the magazine's historic library. While doing so, she discovers copies of letters to the real-life James Beard, written by a young girl named Lulu Swan during World War II. Lulu's family and community is affected and it's clear she copes in part with the hardship through food and cooking. The letters are hidden by code for some mysterious reason by a former librarian and Billie (along with her friend Sammy) read and decode them and want to turn them into a book.
Meanwhile, the building that once housed Delicious! is being sold and it's discovered to be a historic property, adding a sense of urgency to find all the letters in time and make sense out of them.
Ultimately, all is revealed, all mysteries solved, and a resolution is given and a happy ending.
So this is apparently the author's first novel. It's quite ambitious, given that it contains no less than multiple, intersecting b-stories, extended family secrets, a romance, a major style makeover (including literally ditching thick glasses as the "before"), the transformation/coming-to-terms-with-things of both a main character and a secondary main character, historical fiction, and many shifting locales. Unfortunately, none of these are done well. Characters disappear with seemingly no reason (a better editor would've finessed that, I hope), the secrets when revealed are pretty obvious, and there's some unintentional hilarity where the author was going for tragedy. Plenty of stock characters and stale (and unfortunate) tropes abound, and too much feels tacked on and unearned. If the author had tried to keep it simpler, I feel like the novel would've been more successful, but instead she seemed to keep adding more dimensions, basically throwing stuff at the wall to see if it'd stick.
So it's quite a surprise that I found I still enjoyed myself. It's still a pretty compelling read, and the food, particularly in the historical fiction, is kind of fascinating (did you know milkweed tastes like cheese? Or that pumpkin leaves are edible?). The historical section also probes some not-too-explored issues (at least, in my experience) on the homefront in particular with WWII. It desperately needs not only an editor, but maybe a whole team of them, and yet I still had a good time with the book! This isn't so much of a case of a book doesn't need to be good to be good but more "this book is pretty good at being entertaining while also being a huge mess".
I haven't checked to see if the author has written any more fiction in the eight years since this was published. Maybe she did. Maybe it's much better than this. Maybe she found a way to still capture the good time this book provided, but back it up with a good book. Maybe not.
But bottom line, for the messes I've read (and there are far too many to even try to link here), it's still nice to read a mess of a book that still can feel like a party.
Notable:
"Please don't tell me you're buying your salami somewhere else."
"The line at your place is always so long." The cop actually looked guilty.
"Not for you." Sal put his arm around the policeman's shoulders. "Never for the boys in blue. Come see us soon, okay?" (pg 24)
She also notes that "every panhandler got a dollar" and a "Good luck to you", which makes me wonder if Sal knows that police generally hassle panhandlers as well as the homeless. This is the NYPD we're talking about here, just as a reminder.
"You want a store filled with cops and complainers," he said morosely. "Now we've lost Mr. Complainer. Who's next?" (pg 148)
Now I'm wondering if Sal has some sort of deal worked out with the police.
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I reached the Timbers Mansion in a schizophrenic state and went racing up the stairs. (pg 31)
She's describing being stressed out and several hours missing from her new job (and doesn't realize yet that it's all a set up). There are so much better ways to explain that frenzied feeling without resorting to "schizophrenic", which doesn't even make sense.
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Passing a newsstand, I glanced at the headlines. The papers were still talking about the rescue of the Chilean miners earlier in the week, and the feel-good stories were all about them being reunited with their families after sixty-nine days underground. (pg 49)
Oh, look! It's the early 2010s! Given that this happens relatively early in the book, and the book takes place over about two years, it's safe to say this book takes place in the early 2010s. Little to no mention of cell phones, the internet, or social media, though.
I bring this up because there's some super weird unexplained anachronisms:
At one point an uptown lady twitched her mink off a shoulder and trumpeted, "I don't see what's so great about this shop."(pg 75)
When's the last time you saw someone wearing a mink that wasn't wearing a costume and/or the person wasn't a vintage fashion enthusiast? This is supposed to be a snide trendy rich woman in the early 2010s, why is she wearing a mink coat and not, say, a designer handbag?
There was something strangely sensual about this moment, and even though I was sharing it with a man more than twice my age who preferred members of his own sex, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was a seduction scene. (pg 169 and 170)
It's worth pointing out that Billie is describing a heart-to-heart talk over dinner with Sammy. Billie is in her twenties in the early 2010s. Why on earth is she describing a gay character as someone "who preferred members of his own sex"?! She grew up in Santa Barbara and is working in New York City and doesn't belong to nor grow up in some weird regressive cult. "Preferred members of his own sex" would be straining credulity to hear out of the mouth of a twenty-something in the early '80s, let alone the early 2010s.
"Well, I would have married him." Her voice moved lower. "I was in love with him, you see. Bertie loved me too, but not in that way. He was not a woman's man, if you take my meaning." (pg 240)
This is coming from a different character, a person of the Greatest Generation, describing her friendship with a gay man, and thus makes sense, although her reticence with specificity is a bit weird given that later she uses the term "sexual orientation" (which would still work because although she's of the Greatest Generation, she's still living in the 2010s).
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"But I've been wondering why Sal calls you Willie."
"Rosalie disapproves of boys' names for girls. She calls me by my real name, Wilhelmina; Sal shortened it." (pg 61)
Rosalie has lots of issues to work out and also apparently has somehow never heard of Billie Holiday (who took her stage name from the famous Silent actress Billie Dove).
I'd mentioned he had a man crush on Sal (pg 74)
Can we please, please abolish creepy straight-people terms like "man crush" and "bromance"? You have a friendship. It's gonna be okay, honestly.
Sammy looked down at me. "A girl after your own heart!" he said. "In my experience it is a rare female who can say, 'It's only clothes,' and mean it." (pg 107)
If you're writing for gay character, even a foppish one who's interested in clothes, just for the sake of something different, try making him not give the female main character fashion advice and also not spew sexist stereotypes.
I didn't believe he'd really bake the cookies, but the next day he was back, cookies in hand. "What do you think?" He held out a chunky orb.
I took a bite. "I was right: It's a bunch of ingredients stuck in batter and locked in mortal combat. Kind of exhausting."
"Maybe it's a guy thing," he replied. "I like them fine, but [his girlfriend] Thursday's with you. She actually spit hers out." (pg 159)
Or, you know, different people and different tastes, something that as former employees of a food magazine you should know.
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First we drove to Pennsylvania in his beat-up refrigerated van, visiting a gentleman farmer who raised free-range lambs on the most beautiful land I'd ever seen. The lovely animals were grazing across the hills, but when they saw us they came running. "Easter's coming," said Benny as they nuzzled our hands. He made a deal for a dozen lambs, and it made me sad to think that the next time I saw them they'd be nothing more than meat. (pg 80)
That last line would make sense if Billie was feeling depressed and maudlin but it's actually kinda unintentionally hilariously dark coming out of a sunny, happy scene. This is not the only unintentionally humorous section of the book.
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FEBRUARY 15, 1943
Dear Mr. Beard,
Mother calls it "magical thinking" when I say that Father will come back, but what I say is that hope can't hurt. (pg 119)
Mother doesn't call it "magical thinking" because it was 1943 and unless she's doing quite a bit of psychological, college-level studies on the side, that term didn't come into frequent usage the way it's used now until roughly this century.
This is the sort of thing that bugs me, because there are accurate, period/place-appropriate terms ("wishful thinking", "false hope"), this is just plain lazy, especially when the author went to such work with other historical factors and details of World War II.
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That night I dreamed of bodies falling from the sky. Even in my sleep I recognized the images from 9/11-- that man with his leg bent, boots out before him, as he plunged from the glass tower. It made everything seem more immediate. Lulu's war had become my own. (pg 155)
Having immersed herself in the letters and history of World War II, the Millennial Billie translates it to a more recent tragedy that she herself would've survived, 9/11. It's interesting and depressing to think that 9/11 became shorthand to explain tragedy to many for so long, and we're currently in the second year of a pandemic that has not only surpassed 9/11 in death toll, but also possibly in cultural impact. Speaking of which...
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Lulu put her hand out and felt my forehead. "They say this new flu comes on fast, but you don't have a fever." (pg 368)
Ooof. Just saying.
Final Grade: C+
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