When I’m not working, studying, fending off amorous moose or playing emulated NES/SNES games, I read for pleasure to while away the time in sunny Alaska. Here’s my take on the last three I’ve since finished.
Julie and Julia, by Julie Powell
A food-centric memoir, recommended by Brie. We both thought I would enjoy this one. I did derive some satisfaction out of reading it but, unusual for me, I found myself liking it less and less when all was said and done. The reasoning below.
Julie and Julia is about a woman who decides to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 within a single year. The premise was unusual and intriguing. What would the reader learn about french cooking from this book? Which recipes would taste great, and which would fall flat? Are the recipes as butter-and-cream laden as the rumors say? Why would Ms. Powell attempt such a feat?
That last question is a good one, and having read the entire story, I still don’t know precisely why Julie wanted to tackle Julia, especially under her self-imposed clock. Maybe we can figure it out. Julie Powell begins the book as a secretary in a government office. Having little drive, she finds herself withering on the vine. In a similar vein, as the book opens Julie finds herself beget(ha!) with fertility issues. Her marriage is going well enough, but like career and reproduction capabilities, stuck in stasis. Theoretically, this limbo is a good incentive to kickstart a grand project like Mastering, but on closer inspection the reasoning starts to fall apart. Although Julie explains why this particular cookbook(nostalgia), the book fails to go into why cooking as a whole is the solution to her woe. Going back to school, marriage counseling, looking into adoption; these may be effective routes to beating back ennui. Cooking is fun, but Julie never even implies it as a vehicle to a better life after her year(why why why that deadline?!) is up. She runs it out as an experiment, a diversion.
But while the foundation is at best arbitrary, the premise does have merit. It would be stronger still if, for example, the author was soon to attend Le Cordon Bleu, where Ms. Child matriculated, but no matter. Cooking eminently french recipes, serving them to friends and family…entertaining and educational? The potential was there.
Sadly the execution is really where the book falls short. There’s a few reasons for this, but one of the bigbest is simple: You do not care about Julie Powell. Her “quest”, her domestic issues? A big fat “whatever” from the reader. In our defense, these feelings were not self-generation. Rather, these thoughts were merely a reflection of the author’s own voice. In the beginning Julie discussed the difficulty of conceiving with her husband. This is not a bad beginning to getting a reader invested. However, any good will generated with the first few chapters are blown away with incessant drinking and swearing and complaining. And complaining, and complaining. There’s nothing wrong with those things per se, but for engendering sympathy, they are the wrong tack. Who roots for the woman who bitches all day and drinks all night? Clearly she doesn’t root for herself. Why should we get involved?
The second big problem with the premise is that it’s window dressing. The real story is simply a recounting of Julie’s life that year. Certainly the cooking project is prominent, but so are the stories about her family and her remarkably insipid friends. Like attracts like as they say, so there’s no surprise here. But considering how precariously we care about Julie, Pseudonym X and Y’s plight is strictly wasted ink. “Oh no, random chica is having trouble finding romance. Yay, she found romance! Boo, she’s throwing it away for a new romance.” You can blame the author, my gender, or my soul if you want but I have no interest in shallow people making shallow decisions.
We read about the food, but we’re never drawn into the food. Julie whines, throws stuff at her husband, cries, starts a blog, continues to work her job, reports she’s remarkably unsympathetic to 9/11, attracts maggots, dishes, and generally behaves like someone you have little interest in knowing. Well except for her desserts, apparently she’s a champ at pastry making. Actually the food portions are enjoyable. Her journey for bones(to extract marrow) or offal or any number of odd recipes and the ingredients they call for are precisely the scenes I wanted to see in the book. They’re jewels, and like most precious things, far too rare.
One of the oddest passages was the epilogue, where Julie hears that Julia Child has died. Her loyal blog readers clue her in and to their “face” she plays it cool. But moments later, to us, she breaks down and sobs long and hard for the death of Mrs. Child. Although by the finale no one knows what it was, Julia Child was simply a means to an end for Julie. Analogously, it would be like crying when your favorite hammer breaks, or maybe your favorite hammer manufacturer going out of business. No question it’s unfortunate, but great gasping sobs?
There are probably some people out there, not many but some, who read the bible and cry when Jesus goes up on the cross. It would seem to me that such a person would be remarkably sensitive, and their reaction would not seem out of place. A rarity perhaps, but not an oddity. But the issue here is that Julie is not a sensitive person. She doesn’t give a fuck, as she tells her readers many times over. Perhaps it’s a mask, but if so it runs very deep. Certainly deeper than her fledgling authorship skills are able to penetrate. I don’t really care if she’s lying about the death of Julia affecting her, or there are gaps in the story, or her psyche; these are things we are not meant to know. The passage is incongruous, but oddly appropriate to the disconnect of her not caring, yet thinking we will.
Who is the protagonist in Julie and Julia? Who is the villain? Considering it’s an auto-biographical piece, Julie plays all roles. But unlike most autobiographies, where you are simply observing events that have come before, Julie is trying to play on your emotions. She wants the reader to cheer her on. She wants the reader, like her ubiquitous blog readers she quotes so regularly, to be there for her when she stumbles in her pursuits. The primary question all readers will be asking themselves is: Why? Why should we root for this woman? Because she’s trying to cook meals? Because she lives in New York? Because she’s an un-confessed alcoholic? Certainly bad things happen to Julie, but it would be an awfully dull(well, duller) story if nothing bad ever happened to the author. But instead of drama or tension or exaltation when things do go her way, we’re left with blasé. “Problems, yawn. Solutions, yawn.” There’s simply no investment. Every time we get close, she actively tries to push the reader back. Julie reports herself as flighty, and we are helpless not to act the same.
I don’t remember if Julie finished her project on time, nor do I particularly care. Based on the book I am more interested in looking at Mastering the Art of, and simultaneously less interested in anything further by Ms. Powell. Her book was a lark, fluff. That’s fine if it’s what you’re looking for. I just wish someone had told Ms. Powell.
Predictably Irrational, by Daniel Ariely
MIT Professor Dan Ariely spends 304 pages explaining why are humans are, in his words “whack”. Each chapter used evidentiary support to back up a particular foible(Irrational) the human race exhibits and falls victim to on a daily basis(Predictable).
The book is, for the most part, brilliant. Offensively, each chapter explains the oh-so common ways humans are ripe to do things not in their own best interest, and how you can use that information for your own gain. The book begins abruptly with a comparison to the field of economics, and how the paradigm of people always acting in their own best interest is fundamentally flawed. While the author does not suggest the reader go out and be more effective at manipulation per se, he dips his toe into using his data to the betterment of all. More on that in a bit. Whether you use the information presented for good or evil, it’s a great arrow in your quiver.
Defensively, the information is a mighty shield to the forces of persuasion and vice present in the world. Knowing how advertisers try to trick you, or how low cognition drops in the throes of desires(gambling, lust, avarice, the other four, etc.) is incredibly beneficial to your own wallet, maybe your own sanity. Certainly there are great lessons in the book on how to help raise children in this materialistic society. The passage on “anchor pricing” alone was worth the price of admission. The Economist Magazine’s trick to get people to buy online and print subscriptions? Utterly brilliant.
It’s a good book, but not perfect. Dan can’t quite maintain the full book’s length, which leads to the later chapters feeling tacked on, pedantic, or whimsical. He’s clearly at his best on any subject involving money, which luckily is a major percentage of the book. Dan spends some ink about his quest to use his data to change the policies of a large credit card company. Dan tells the board that his data will allow them to make (almost) comparable sums of money, but heavily reduce the amount of consumer debt in the country. A laudable goal, but the board (for some odd reason) does not take him up on his offer. Ironically, Dan’s optimism seemed irrational, the result predictable. I can’t say he was wrong to make the attempt, but it seemed more like a foot note than worth the time Dan spent sharing the story with the reader.
Aside from a few middling sections, the book hums along at a brisk pace. Dan has an easygoing style, and explains the tedious experimentation procedures well. He’s clearly a teacher, although whether that’s a plus or minus is the call of the reader. Regardless, for the information he presents on humanity and daily life in America, I would suggest this as required reading. It’s not 100% gold, but how much do you need before your awareness has been improved dramatically? You can skip the last few chapters with no great loss, but reading the first 7-10 should be anyone’s top priority.
The United States of Arugula, by David Kamp
Another food book, this one promised gravitas to back up its subject matter. A very complete tome, at least for the subjects that earned chapters, yet the breezy, optimistic tones of the book kept the reader from feeling overwhelmed. The reader was overwhelmed, but credit to the author in preventing the reader from feeling that way.
First, I confess I am probably not the target audience. The book throws around French like it was the underpinnings of all American culinary traditions, or somesuch. True as that may be, the assumption that the reader knows enough French, or at least French dishes, to not Wiki every other italicized entree was certainly a failure on my end. I’ve also never read Mastering the Art of, which I’m sure puts me in a minority of the readership. Names and dates were thrown out like parade candy, and it’s up to the reader to determine how much, or how little, they want to exert themselves during the show. I chose little.
My take with these kinds of historical works is that they’re written for two reasons. One is looking back farther than anyone there being alive today. What were things like during the Revolutionary War? I have no idea, but luckily you don’t either. We can both read 1776 and start on equal footing. The other perspective is the nostaligic one, where the author presumes the reader was around for a good percentage of the book’s subject matter. Here, the author would revist scenes of childhood memory, ideally with a different, inside perspective than any one person’s experiences from back then. While of course I know of Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali, these characters are introduced in chapter 11(of 12). My guess, although no back cover would dare restrict its buyers in such a way, was that that this book was written for my parents’ generation, i.e. Baby Boomers. Too much ink was spent on protests and Julia Child to think differently. Chapters ~1-3 get the 1950-born reader up to speed, and the rest goes to how the key players were acting while you(but not me) were watching, decades ago. It is interesting, but in my case, in the same interesting way scenery looks when travelling by train. Good stuff, but far too much goes by too quickly to retain.
Kamp progresses in a steady if languid way. The egg of locale meets the sperm of a key player, and a new food epoch is born across the country. It comes off as slightly surreal. There’s no question that the right person in the right place can alter the course of gastro-history. But Kamp takes it further, and anecdotally shares with the reader how everyone who was at the epicenter of the new fad went on to gigantic deeds. “Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse and is now the champion of growing local. Jeremiah Tower cooked at Chez Panisse for many years and is one of the most famous chefs in America. Albert Smithson bussed dishes for six months on work-release, and went on to invent China.” And so forth. One realizes that not everyone involved in a project went on to glory, but odds are if Kamp named you in the book, you were a prominant figure somewhere. And Kamp throws out a lot of names. The feeling of being overwhelmed again.
Locations and names and France started running together pretty quickly, but one concept latched onto and threaded throughout the book was the war of convenience. America had quite the internal struggle going with the convenience’s value: a question of whether ease and bargain beat (eventual) taste and (sometimes) expense. There were lots of pockets of our history where cooking wives were encouraged, socially, into TV dinners and microwaves, where only a few years before, the stereotype of four simmering pots was the house-wivean ideal. Although I realize years passed in the turn of a page, it seemed incredibly abrupt, the appeal then stigma of using prepared meals. The battle may not be over.
There were a few misfires along the way. Kamp’s style loves to throw around inside cultural references and portmanteau. He clearly loves being the stylish one, making you work a little harder to get each and every reference dropped. I don’t hold it against him; I think he laid it on strong, but I appreciate something similar. Unfortunately in my case, since I was already giving up all those 60s and 70s references anyway, the tonal crests and valleys breezed past too. Maybe 10% of the book gets lost this way, but since Kamp had the good sense to surround that 10% with very obvious words(in English!), not much content was lost. It depends on the reader I suppose; I’m sure there are many out there who would find it maddening. Let’s put it like this: I was not at all surprised to learn David Kamp writes for Rolling Stone. YMMV.
All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone with food interests. The history is interesting and instructive, and there is certainly plenty of real human drama present in the stories. Kamp is clearly passionate about the subject matter, and the fact that that’s clear is a big plus in the column. As far as my knowledge of the history of food culture in the U.S. is concerned, I feel pretty satisfied.
