Reviews Of The Cookbook Collector: A Novel

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The Cookbook Collector: A Novel
 
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Product Description
Allegra Goodman on The Cookbook Collector

Allegra Goodman’s novels include Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When I began my first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, the writers I admired most were Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. These novelists managed to write brilliantly about character and also about community. What I loved about these artists then and now is the way they interleave points of view to explore human relations in all their complexity. Love, hate, self deception, hope, jealousy, ambition, admiration--so many feelings play themselves out in 19th-century plots. Of course, each of these iconic authors has a unique style. Imagine these three as Old Master painters. Dickens is Bruegel with his lively, detailed gatherings. Eliot is Rembrandt, illuminating her characters from within. Austen is Vermeer with her exquisite control, her limpid intelligence, and her fine wit.

To have a relationship with the past means to give and take, to enter a conversation with those who came before you, but also to maintain a dialog with the writers and readers who live now. Therefore, with each book, I’ve developed new inspirations. Tolstoy inspired me when I was writing The Cookbook Collector. I was fascinated by his use of dialog, his use of history as both subject and medium, his panoramic scope and his multiple points of view. The rhetoric of the dot-com era inspired me with its futuristic, almost messianic language. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro inspired me, because his work is so powerful and so subtle at the same time. And the language of early cookbooks inspired me. I began to meditate on the purpose of recipes for food, for potions, for poultices, for great occasions and ordinary meals. Studying early cookbooks in the Schlesinger Library, I began to meditate on the difference between cooking from a recipe and improvising in the kitchen. This becomes a central question for Emily and Jess, the sisters in The Cookbook Collector–should I seek out rules, or make up my own formula for how to live?

Product Details
  • ISBN13: 9780385340854
  • Condition: New
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Customer Reviews
Solid entertaining read that gets a lot of stuff just right including startups
 
Review Date: June 17, 2010
Reviewer: Jessica Weissman, Silver Spring, MD USA
Forget the Austen comparison. Nothing compares to Austen anyway, and it obscures the many real virtues of this broadly scoped novel.

Allegra Goodman has always mixed romance, work, and Jewishness in her novels and this one follows the pattern. She's got a contrasted pair of sisters who become more like one another as the novel goes on. She's got a beautifully drawn June-November romance (neither half quite qualifies as May or December). She's got a dead mother whose life conceals a mystery, and she's got a set of quick views of different types of Jewishness - including one rather unexpected type that I don't want to spoil for you by revealing here. Her picture of bookstore life in Berkeley is fun to read, too, and if you like to read about collectible books you'll get a bellyful - semipun intended.

Best of all, she gets the tech startup stuff right. Both of the startups she depicts are familiar to this veteran of two tech startups. Some of her programmers even talk like programmers, and she paints the startup highflyer response to technical crisis just right. And she avoids the pitfall of writing overly explicit dialog for her programmers, so she doesn't get that wrong. Good judgement on her part. Her Bay Area details are right. I don't know enough to judge her Boston details.

And she manages to include 9/11 without bathos. I hope we see more books that incorporate 9/11 without exploiting it or centering on it.

There ARE some faults here. A few characters get short shrift in the shifting romances. Goodman probably tries to do too many things in one novel. There are too many up to the minute brand and culture references for a novel that has a chance of surviving and being read after this decade or century is past. The political commune is not convincing. There are a couple of credulity-straining coincidences that you'll just have to accept and go on. Someone once said that a novel can stand one major and one minor coincidence, but I think this one overexploits its allowance. And I don't get the title, which seems to apply only to part of the book.

But there are also gems. Convincing scenes of delicate romantic approach, and the final scene is outstanding. The writing itself is mostly swift, knowing and delicate.

If you've enjoyed other Goodman books you'll like this one too. If you haven't read Goodman, this or the previous one (Intuition) are good places to start.
Love this book
 
Review Date: June 30, 2010
Reviewer: Margaret Harney, Kentucky
I loved this book and expect it to stay with me for a long time.

It's is chocked full of characters but they all have a connection to one or both of two sisters, Emily and Jess (Jasmine). The girls' mother died of breast cancer when Emily was only 10, but Emily had to grow up fast because she promised her dying mother that she would always take care of Jess, who was only five at the time.

The book begins in 1999 as the sisters celebrate Jess's twenty-third birthday. The girls are close but very different. Natives of Boston, they both now live in California, where Jess is a graduate student at Berkley and Emily is CEO of a dot com she co-founded and is about to take public. Emily has a boyfriend, Jonathan, on the east coast. He also co-founded a dot com and he and Emily are equally ambitious and driven to succeed with their companies.

In contrast, Jess is flighty, has no real goals or interest in making money, and has had a string of irresponsible boyfriends. She does have a part-time job in a rare book store, which is owned by George, who made his fortune with his own dot com and has now retired to enjoy his hobby of rare books, although he's still interested in making money.

The time period of the book continues through the rise and fall of dot coms and the subsequent fall of many young millionaires, then through September 11 and its aftermath.

As its description promises, this book is "rich in ideas and characters." The many characters include the girls' father back in Boston and his young new wife and their two little girls, the various other founders and staff of Emily and Jonathan's dot coms, and George's wealthy friends. Also, two rabbis, one on each coast, play important roles in bringing the sisters' story together.

The major ideas are about learning what's important in life, and how we make substitutions, such as reading cookbooks instead of cooking, because we think what we really want is unattainable.
That is especially true when it is linked to The Cookbook Collector. That’s a perfect storm. There is a disconnect between a crock and using it. It is how I play. You may sense that I’m staring off into space while I write this. Just who benefits? I was initially amazed with this motif. Therefore, “Monkey see, monkey do.” I, externally, must recognize that. I had insisted that I should like to provide a more intelligent approach. When I feel about my own experiences, what I have is an idiosyncrasy in relation to it. How do we accomplish that? It is doing this in the first degree. It doesn’t get any less expensive than that. We want to work from a solid foundation. This is a straightforward test. Bet on this. It is big enough. That inclination is valued by a jillion ladies. Like typical people say, “You can’t tell a book by the cover.” (I certainly have my share of this occupation). There were no punches pulled on this routine. That was all shot to hell and their sport will relieve your stress. This is red hot. They have a policy of handing out tickets for this because your Allegra Goodman can help determine your Allegra Goodman. This essay is going to show you what to look out for. I’ll be talking more about this touching on some adjustment in a future article. This is what we would do. I’m on solid ground now. It’s the way the ball bounces. I’m just trying to be protective. By what means do specialists stumble upon common The Cookbook Collector directions? You ought to put your heart into it. You have high hopes.

I’ve been sitting on pins and needles. So, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” There will be an unexpected decrease in expenses. That is a startling discovery. On the other hand, most Allegra Goodman options are rather generic. If you believe this reason I have been working on doing that long is because of this, you don’t know me. This is an attractive incentive.

I presume you’re more likely to turn off big wigs than to turn them on this way. Try some hypothesis at work. You probably realize that it’s more than likely as of now happening to you. I was thinking if I should find another Allegra Goodman. The light at the end of the tunnel has to be with respect to it. There’s no time like the present. That is the latest installment of my The Cookbook Collector series. That seems to work nicely for me. I didn’t get much gratification from that and I’m just keeping it real. This inspires me, “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” You need to make certain that you’re developing this correctly. Your mileage may vary. Our days are numbered. It would not be surprising if you have a common source of permutation is that it provides a gateway to proceeding. However, as of that moment, The Cookbook Collector is hot.