Sweetbitter--by Stephanie Danler

Tess, a small towner from the Midwest, moves to the big apple for a taste of how the other half lives.
With no plan or artistic talents to explore, she lands an aisle seat to the lifestyle of the rich and famous from the vantage point of a backwaiter--that's New York for bus boy--at a ritzy restaurant known for its
eclectic menu and rare wines.
The novel charts the ingenue's rite of passage in the quirky hard knocks world of a popular New York restaurant until she's wise and ready to transcend her debutante stage.
Stephanie Danler, drawing from her behind the stage experience at an upper crust NY eatery, details
the nuances and specificity of precision food prep, the science and art of wine tasting with an alacrity that equally extolls and undermines the rarefied lives of the privileged. Danler's narrative style is rich and lavishly textured that it makes even passages about a food inspection riveting.
As Tess, the protagonist, delves deeper into the day laborer's life of a carnival of excess with food, drugs, and liquor in the after hours, while her work day consumes her in details and obedience in learning a thankless craft of servitude to the rich and powerful that it can be likened to a geisha's life, there's certainly more bitter to the occasional sweet.
Understandably young, impressionable, and lonely, Tess falls for a brooding narcissistic damaged goods of a guy who rings every alarm for the reader at first glance. There are pages and pages of this rather short novel dedicated to pangs of obsessive infatuation that would seem excessive to a female prisoner in solitary confinement. Yet, I endured them for even ridiculous lovesickness is endearing with ace prose.
Her last act at the restaurant felt like a dessert with wrongly paired wine. Sweetbitter indeed. But the unintended lesson for me is how the cold heartless corporate machine brainwashes these laborers into believing in a higher purpose of aesthetic loftiness when the hard fact is, they're being ground out like at
bootcamp for slave wages and benefits so the entitled can feel more deserved and pampered. The hell with these French-named NY restaurants. The next time I go there, I'm hunting down hole in the wall, mom and pop places where the owner will bring your food and tell you their story as you taste their homestyle goodness.
May be an image of drink and text that says 'SWEETBITTER A NOVEL STEPHANIE DANLER'
Like
Comment
Share

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Donald James', "Monstrum"

Donald James certainly can’t be blamed for lacking ambition. His Monstrum is set in a future Russia where a new party is in power with the promise of change, but people’s loyalties rest uneasy. While this grants enough drama as it is, stirring up this potent setup is a plot about a heinous serial killer who cuts up victims in puzzling ways, a subplot about an underground (literally) sex-cult, and the subversive rebels threatening the new government. Populating this universe is a gallery of colorful characters--an American profiler, an opportunistic police chief, a smitten doctor, a reluctant police force, the elusive monstrum itself, and of course the bumbling cop protagonist. Because of his political connections or despite them, a drunken cop is assigned to catch the serial killer. The doctor and profiler both pine for the cop, insisting on his affections, while the cop yearns for his ex-wife who abandoned him to lead a rebel group in guerilla warfare. More interested in a failed
Read more

Amelie Nothomb's, "Fear and Trembling"

This little novel won France's prestigious Grand Prix de l'Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre awards. Nothomb, a Belgian writer, achieves on many levels with this fictional work. The novel reads like an incisive look at corporate culture in Japan with a crash course on the inscrutable Japanese mindset. With the protagonist sharing the author's first name and other similarities, the book immediately imparts a closed-door intimacy akin to an autobiography. As a little helper in the Import-Export division of the Yumimoto Corporation, Amelie wreaks accidental havoc from scene to scene like a silent movie comedian; only her turmoil is all emotional. In the peculiar way Amelie laughs at her misfortune her blunders that lead to harsh retributions somehow come off as tragicomic. Complicating further her situation is Amelie's unrequited crush on her unflappable boss, Fubuki. The more Amelie tries to impress Fubuki, the worse things get for both. The ambivalent
Read more

The Cartel Trilogy--by Don Winslow

The Cartel Trilogy by Don Winslow is a blistering tour de force of crime fiction. It is more importantly a Ph.D level thesis on the intricacies of the war on drugs with a scope and scale that highlight all the players on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Power of the Dog This is part one of the trilogy. Winslow spent more than 10 years researching this novel. Borrowing from his previous professions as Private Investigator and Crime TV creator, Winslow breathes life into every character in every faction. This novel courses the early years of the cartels when they morphed into an organized syndicate, a territory-abiding oligarchy. The protagonist, Arturo Keller, is a Mexican-American ex-soldier whose background and training make him the perfect fit for the DEA. He gradually freelances his way into the inner world of the narco figures and sees a panoramic view of the drug war from both sides of the border. While several crime figures vie for the antagonist title, Adan Barrera,
Read more