The Lost Art of Mixing, by Erica Bauermeister

In The Lost Art of Mixing, Erica Bauermeister picks up some of the characters from The School of Essential Ingredients (reviewed here in October 2011), a year after the events in that book. Lillian, owner of the restaurant that was the center of the earlier book, is living with widower Tom and has just discovered she is pregnant, something she does not think Tom, who is still grieving his wife's death, will welcome. Chloe has become sous chef at the restaurant and has begun to grow out of her awkwardness. She is living with Isabella, whose Alzheimer's is progressing.

To these characters, Bauermeister adds Finnegan, a gangly new dishwasher at the restaurant who is enamored with Chloe; Al, Lillian's accountant, and his miserable wife Louise; and Abby, Isabella's Type A daughter. All of the characters are searching for meaning and happiness in their lives, and this time around, many of them find it in a book about rituals and celebrations that Al shoplifts (while involved in a crazy "adventure" in which he goes into bookstores pretending to be an author and volunteering to autograph books). The group plans a birthday celebration for Isabella, while Louise adapts a Mayan ritual for her 52nd birthday (her adaptation involves breaking all the light bulbs in the house because Al has forgotten to buy bulbs at the hardware store). We also get back story on the various characters, and it is notable that many of them lost one or both parents early, either to death or to psychological distancing.

Food plays a smaller role here than in The School of Essential Ingredients--and I was sorry about that. But I was happy that Bauermeister moved past the artificial structure of the cooking class and simply let new characters emerge through their natural interactions with each other. Bauermeister is a talented writer; while her books are not the deepest, they offer an upbeat view of how people can make their lives work--and an upbeat view can be a nice change of pace!

Favorite passages:
They had talked into the evenings, and the separate languages of mother and child shifted into a vocabulary they could hold in common.

His grass sprawled out before him, shaggy and rough-edged, the Mickey Rourke of lawns.

The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer

The Septembers of Shiraz covers the experiences of one wealthy Jewish-Iranian family in the year between September 1981 and September 1982. The father, Isaac Amin, is one of many people who flourished under the shah's regime but then are imprisoned in the post-revolutionary period. The tedium of prison, the relationships that develop with other prisoners, the frustration of being asked the same questions day after day, the horror of hearing people shot outside the cell, the post-torture suffering, the debilitating fear of not knowing what will happen--all are explored in the sections of the book told from Isaac's perspective.

Isaac's sections alternate with those told from the perspectives of the other members of the Amin family. Farnaz, Isaac's wife, is dealing with her own problems: her own and Isaac's families;  family servant Habibe, who is beginning to spout revolutionary rhetoric and may be stealing from Farnaz--yet Farnaz can not fire her because she can't run the household without Habibe; the looting of the family business by former employees, led by Habibe's son; searching of their home by the Revolutionary Guard; and concern for her husband and children. Parviz, an architecture student in New York, lives with a Hasidic family in Brooklyn; unable to pay his rent when his parents stop sending him money after his father's arrest, he is forced to work at his landlord's hat shop. Feeling isolated at his university, Parviz falls in love with his landlord's daughter--but a relationship is impossible because he is a nonpracticing Jew. Shirin, Isaac and Farnaz's daughter, is only nine, but she too is affected by the political situation. Her friend Leila's father is a member of the Revolutionary Guard; playing at their house, Shirin finds investigation folders and steals several, hoping that she can save some other men from being arrested. When Leila's father discovers files are missing, Leila protects Shirin because "No one came to my house as often as you did."  I won't reveal what happens to the Amin family (though I will complain that Parviz seems to be left out of the resolution).

Isaac and Farnaz are not particularly sympathetic characters--they benefited from a regime that terrorized many Iranians; indeed, they seem unaware of the extent of the repression under the shah. Ironically, one of Isaac's tormentors in prison was a victim of the Savak, the secret police under the shah. Yet he feels no compunction about treating others as badly as he was treated. Parviz and Shirin are truly innocent victims of the situation, and their stories are touching.

Sofer writes gracefully, and her descriptions appeal to all of the senses. Perhaps because I could not identify with Isaac and Farnaz, I did not love The Septembers of Shiraz, but I have a greater appreciation for Iran and the hardships created by the revolution of 1979 as a result of reading this novel.

Favorite passage:
The task numbs him, half-formed thoughts emerging from his mind like the vapor rising from his steam machine, and vanishing just as quickly. Time moves slowly here, like those agonizing hours spent in mind-numbing high school classes . . . And yet something has changed in him so gravely that he now actually enjoys these slow indistinguishable hours which pass him by, demanding so little of him, no more than fish swimming in an aquarium.

Standing on the stoop, he tucks his gloveless hands in his pockets and looks out onto the dark street. How unyielding is that space between connection and interruption. One false move, one misspoken word, and you find yourself on the wrong side of things.

Dinner: A Love Story, by Jenny Rosenstrach

The food-blog-turned-book trend began with Julie and Julia, which was an inventive, well-written, and hilarious book. For me, subsequent books have generally fallen short of the standard set by Julie Powell (I've also read Cleaving, reviewed on this blog in January 2010, so I know even Julie Powell can't attain that standard with every effort). Dinner: A Love Story also falls a bit short, though I recognize that I'm not really the target audience for the book and younger moms might find it very helpful.

Jenny Rosenstrach was a magazine editor dedicated to having her family eat dinner together (since 1998, she has kept a diary of what she has eaten for dinner every night--did I mention she has done this since 1998?). Then she was thrown out of work in late 2009 by the folding of her magazine (Cookie). She decided to start a blog devoted to the concept of the family dinner (http://www.dinneralovestory.com) and in 2012 published this book based, in part, on the blog. Like other blogs-to-books that are not strictly cookbooks, the content of the blog has been expanded, in this case creating a book that is part memoir, part parenting book, and part cookbook. 

The book is divided into three sections: "Rituals, Relationships, Repertoires," in which she describes the early years of her marriage when she and husband Andy were developing their dinner tradition and their cooking skills; "New Parenthood," an honest discussion of the chaos of the years when her children were infants/toddlers and she and Andy began to refine the dinner tradition and their parenting skills; and "Family Dinner," focusing on more recent years when the dinner tradition has become more manageable and rewarding. In each section, she includes recipes for dishes that were staples during that phase of her life, as well as tips for cooking, parenting, and establishing a dinner tradition.

I realized fairly early in the book that it didn't have a lot of relevance to a 62-year-old who lives alone and cooks mostly for herself, but Rosenstrach's writing has a charm that kept me progressing through the book (it's a quick read, so that also influenced me). I'd be interested to hear whether parents with kids at home find the book helpful.

Favorite passage:
In our house, debuting something new at the table--no matter how subtly new it may be--is always more about trying the dish than it is about loving it. In fact, just not hating something is considered a victory, a moment worthy of celebration and positive reinforcement. ("Good for you! You didn't spit it out!")

Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse, by Calvin Trillin

My library choices seem to have taken a turn toward humorous poetry--Suddenly Sixty and Dogfight in the same week. Dogfight is 154 pages long, and sustaining the rhyming for that many pages means that it sometimes lapses into, well, doggerel (sorry, couldn't stop myself). Some of the rhymes are quite clever, but when you see on the first page that Trillin has rhymed "dude'll" with "poodle," you know he'll stop at nothing.

Trillin intersperses the poetic narrative with shorter poems, such as "Adieu Santorum": The race will miss the purity/That you alone endow./We'll never find another man/Who's holier than thou."  Occasionally, he makes a "Pause for Prose"; my favorite of these was "Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough."

Dogfight is funny--but probably only if you're a Democrat. Trillin aims almost exclusively at Republicans; while they provided plenty of fodder (or kibble) in 2012, even for a Democrat it's almost unforgivable that "They're going to put y'all back in chains" and "You didn't make that" "They're going to put y'all back in chains" and "You didn't build that" don't even get a mention.

Favorite passage:
Mitt Romney asked us all to contemplate
If we are better off than in '08.
Though he neglected mentioning our troops, 
(Did Perry, watching, silently say "oops"?)
Mitt did speak well, but still did not illumine
The question on folks' minds: is this dude human? 


Obama's speech was good, of course, whereas
Bill Clinton gave a speech with real pizzazz.
Upstaged? Well, yes, but by a speech with flair,
And not by Eastwood and an empty chair. 

Suddenly Sixty and Other Shocks of Later Life, by Judith Viorst

I haven't read one of Judith Viorst's decades books for quite a while, perhaps decades. But Suddenly Sixty called to me from the shelf when I was at the library this morning. As with her earlier collections, the poems in Suddenly Sixty are far from perfect, but they are entertaining. Viorst has a way of identifying the anxieties and irritations of the stages of a woman's life--and writing about them in humorous rhyme. For example, "A Whole Other Stage" begins with the line "I've reached the stage where my lawyer, my broker, my allergies, and my president are all significantly younger than I" and goes on to recount such other indicators of the state of mind the 60s puts you in as worrying about cardiac arrest before infidelity when your husband doesn't answer the phone at 6 a.m. Even some of the titles made me chuckle: "So My Husband and I Decided to Take a Car Trip Throuogh New England" and "When Asked If I Thought That I'd Finally Got It Together."

Occasionally, Viorst veers into more serious territory, as when she writes about cemetery plots or asks if she did something wrong in raising the child who "is stumbling through jungles of bitterest black,/Lost in the fog that he buys,/ Wearing a rebel's disguise,/Unwilling, or unable, to come back."  She also writes of the joy of having grandchildren:

He rushes to greet her,
His arms outstretched,
Joyfully calling her name,
When he sees her arrive.

Ah, yes. Viorst does know what it's like to be 60.

Favorite passage:
I wish you, I wish you
A dream worth the doing.
And fortune's face smiling
On all you're pursuing.
And pleasures that far far
Outweigh your small sorrows.
Arms opened wide to embrace your tomorrows.

(Wouldn't this make a good toast? I love a nice rhyming toast.)

Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench opens in 1852, with four slave women "vacationing" with their masters at a resort in southern Ohio. They are fascinated by the free blacks who work at the resort and stunned when they see the resort frequented by wealthier free African Americans within walking distance from the cottages where they are staying.

One of the women, Lizzie, is hoping to convince her master, Drayle, to free their two children, but she is unsuccessful; nor will he agree to sell his slave Phillip, who has fallen in love with a local free woman. Nonetheless, Lizzie has convinced herself that she loves Drayle. When a woman named Muwa tries to convince the group of slaves to make a run for freedom, Lizzie tells Drayle of the plan, and Muwa is brutally beaten and raped.

Through a flashback, we learn how Lizzie and Drayle's "relationship" started and see the bizarre role that white women play in these twisted domestic arrangements. Drayle's wife Fran physically attacks Lizzie, tries to sell her, and finally seems to accept her place in the household. At the same time, she alternately rejects and coddles Lizzie's two children.

In 1853, the four women return to the Tawawa House resort with their masters and, without revealing everything that happens, it can safely be said that the visit is packed with dramatic developments. When Lizzie returns to the Drayle plantation that summer, she does not believe they will return the next summer, and yet they do--this time with Fran in tow. Through the events of the final summer, Lizzie begins to develop a an independent sense of self and has, thankfully, awakened to the impossibility of meaningful love with a man who "owns" her.

Wench is in many ways surprising and, while it is not a great novel, it does open the reader's eyes to the complexities of the sexual and domestic arrangements among slaves and the families that "owned" them.

Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones

Dana Lynn Yarboro announces in Silver Sparrow's first paragraph that her father, whom she calls James, is a bigamist who was already married to Laverne when he met Dana's mother. He also has another daughter, Chaurisse, the legitimate child who gets to call her father Daddy. While Dana and her mother Gwen know all about James's first family--they even "surveil" the house from time to time--Laverne and Chaurisse know nothing about them, and James insists it remain that way. If both girls are selected for a summer science program or hired for a summer job at Six Flags, Dana must give up the opportunity to protect Chaurisse.  Dana, who is smart, feisty, beautiful, and precocious, understandably resents being the "secret" daughter and rebels by hanging out with an older, abusive boy, smoking weed, and engaging in other inappropriate behaviors. While she resents the chubby and apparently bland Chaurisse, she also finds herself creating opportunities for their paths to cross.

Then Tayari Jones tricks us by switching narrators, giving Chaurisse--to this point a seemingly dull girl--the second half of the book. Chaurisse, it turns out, is struggling as much as Dana is. Her reputation has been ruined by gossiping church ladies, she has no friends, and she is acutely aware that she does not excel at much of anything. When she meets Dana while they are both shoplifting at a drugstore, she is excited to have made a friend, especially one who is so pretty and confident. When the two start hanging out together, it's only a matter of time until the s(*& hits the fan.

Silver Sparrow is not the most gracefully written or originally plotted book, but Tayari Jones does  make us feel the sadness visited upon Dana and Chaurisse by their parents' actions and, in Dana's case, by the secrets she is forced to keep. These sisters need each other--and they need more from their parents; it's heart-breaking when their needs are ignored.

Favorite passage:
Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too.