skygiants | (no subject)

The most fun is when you're reading a book for book group and you're super angry about a bunch of things and then you get to book group and everyone is mad about the EXACT SAME THINGS.

This month's book group book was Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, in which a modern author attempts to write Jane Austen but, alas, succeeds at neither affectionate satire nor romance. Which is not to say she succeeds at nothing! This book is largely full of very believable people, and parts of it work very well; I just hated every single male character in it.

(Well, that's not true. There was a genial Chasidic rabbi whom I quite liked, two very incidental gay booksellers who occasionally flirted with each other at parties, and a stressed-out HR manager with a bad back who I just wanted to get a massage chair and leave the book forever. These men were all fine. I exempt them from the blanket condemnation.)

The book is a Period Piece about two sisters in The Year 1999; Emily, the elder sister has founded an internet startup right on the cresting wave of the dot-com boom, and Jess, the younger sister, is an idealistic Berkeley philosophy student who works part-time at a used bookstore and spends the rest of her time attempting to save the trees.

Half the book takes place in Berkeley, where Jess dates an intense tree-saving activist and moves into his revolutionary commune while her middle-aged millionaire antiquarian bookstore boss George pines after her creepily. Then Jess and George acquire a historical cookbook collection for the bookstore and become mutually obsessed with it. The cookbook collection is lovely and interesting! WOULD THAT GEORGE WERE SO. Jess and George end up dating and, eventually, get married. This was the first thing we all started screaming about in horror at book group and did not stop for 90 minutes. Book group host's partner, in the next room: 'I was surprised and impressed at the amount of swearing!'

The other half takes place in Cambridge, where Emily's boyfriend Ruthless Entrepreneur Jonathan also runs a less successful startup and may or may not be planning to steal Emily's development ideas. Jonathan is awful. We are supposed to hate Jonathan. In a surprising twist, Jonathan then dies on one of the 9/11 planes!

aamcnamara: 'We hit 9/11, and then I had to put the book down for a while bracing for the kind of bad 9/11 take you always get in these books, but then I picked it up again and instead found that Jonathan died and that was great!' We are not supposed to hate Jonathan's friend Orion, a programmer who's finding himself left behind by the startup's rapid capitalization and also stagnating in his relationship with his girlfriend Molly, but WE DID HATE HIM. WE HATED HIM SO MUCH.

We also hated Sorel, the object of Orion's straying affections and the only female programmer at the startup, who is beautiful and sylphlike and British and has a band and occasionally spends her weekends as a living statue in Harvard Square. Comments about Sorel from book group: "Why did you put Amanda Palmer in this book? Having a real Amanda Palmer is already bad enough!" "At first I thought Sorel was completely unbelievable, but then I realized, I do know people like that, it's just that in Cambridge they're all also two out of the following three -- queer, poly, or trans -- and Sorel is none of those things! She would be way more likeable AND more realistic if she were!"

....so that's all the stuff I hated but THERE WAS LEGITIMATELY some stuff I liked much of which comes towards the end of the book. There's a low-key thread running throughout about Jess and Emily's mother, who died of cancer when they were kids; there's another low-key thread about Jess' relationship with the nice local Chasidic rabbi, who's into tech and lends her some money to invest in Emily's startup. At the end of the book, in a wildly implausible coincidence, it turns out that Jess and Emily's dead mother was a runaway Orthodox Jew and the youngest sister of the rabbi's wife!!! THIS is the kind of 19th-century nonsense I am here for. Also, the theme of being an adult and discovering a dead maternal relative's interiority and family history through letters and family stories that were previously inaccessible is somewhat resonant right now.

Anyway, Emily recovers from Jonathan's death by going to meet all her Chasidic relatives and then using that experience to launch a genealogy startup. This was a perfectly acceptable ending for Emily; no complaints.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

At the end of the book, in a wildly implausible coincidence, it turns out that Jess and Emily's dead mother was a runaway Orthodox Jew and the youngest sister of the rabbi's wife!!! THIS is the kind of 19th-century nonsense I am here for. A

I am glad at least it gave you that! I am sorry the rest of the book was not more about flirtatious gay booksellers and Chasidism. I bet it could be made to work.

This is definitely one of those books where I'm like 'I could write a much better version! IF ONLY I CARED ENOUGH.'

The 9/11 thing at first struck me as a very ill-advised "modern" version of the Downton Abbey opener of the betrothed dying on the Titanic, but this book predated that so I guess Goodman got that all on her own. ... or from the same place all media that randomly feels the need to tie into 9/11 does.

You're right, though, it IS very much the kind of ... not actually nineteenth-century nonsense, but the kind of thing modern media imitating nineteenth-century nonsense does in which Every Historical Disaster means One Representative Character Must Die. "DID YOU KNOW, x million people died in the Spanish flu? INCLUDING, alas, side protagonist y!'

Which, someone on Downton Abbey also died of Spanish flu! But I feel like that one's a bit more fair, as the chances of dying of Spanish flu were a lot greater than being on the Titanic or one of the 9/11 planes, which is so incredibly unlikely. Unless your story is actually about 9/11, there's really no reason to have a character die like that.

Sounds like time would be better spent rereading The Golden Gate.