You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2006.
Saturday
Ian McEwan (Anchor Books, 2006)
Since I seem to be on a book-into-movie kick, have they started making a movie of Saturday yet? Because I know who should play the main character: Jonathan Pryce, who played Keira Knightley’s father in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” film franchise.
McEwan may not have written this book intending for it to become a film, but it’s practically a made-for-Hollywood affair already. And honestly, this would make a more enjoyable 125-minute movie than nearly three-hundred page book.
Saturday is the recipient of lavish praise from the literary bigwigs at Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, lauded for its vivid description of a single day in our modern life. But given that this book is from the perspective of an upper-upper-middle class, 50-something, British brain surgeon, there’s only so much that more normal readers can relate to.
I thoroughly enjoyed the last McEwan book I read, Atonement, a compelling and intricate period piece, rich with family relationships, betrayal, war, and so forth. McEwan inhabited two female characters in that book, and coupled with his well-wrought historical perspective the book was quite engrossing.
There’s no denying that McEwan is a talented writer, with a gift for handily capturing all the elements of the worlds his characters inhabit. And no doubt the tastemakers at the Times Book Review will put Saturday in its list of the best 25 books of the first 25 years of the 21st century (it would, but for its publication date, easily fit with the white-male aesthetic of its best 25 of the last 25 years). But here, McEwan has taken the same technique that worked so well for mid-century middle-class women and reconfigured it entirely from the p.o.v. of one man remarkably similar — in many ways save for occupation — to himself, and the results are far less interesting.
Saturday tells the story of one man’s Saturday, in February 2003, just weeks before the U.S. launched its ill-advised war on Iraq, dragging a raggedy “coalition of the willing” (including the U.K.) along with it. Would that my weekends were nearly as eventful as Henry Perowne’s. Therein lies just part of Saturday’s weakness. If your intention is to write about a day in the life, perhaps a more mundane day would suffice. You have only to look as far as Michael Cunningham’s peerless The Hours for an example of how to refashion the humdrum into the sublime.
Instead, McEwan has given us an exceptional day in an exceptional man’s life, and added more exceptional filigree to the day, including an ending more suitable for Hollywood than real life. And by inhabiting the main character’s head for the bulk of the story, Saturday plods along narratively with only brief, episodic relief. Maybe he should have called it Monday instead…
Heat
by Bill Buford (Knopf, 2006)
Words cannot properly describe how much I cherish Bill Buford’s previous book, Among the Thugs. This 1991 study of English football hooligans — part sociological study, part journalism, part true-crime — came out of nowhere (literally, part of a reading list for “Deviance & Conformity,” a sociology class at UC Santa Cruz) and forever shifted what I believed possible in non-fiction.
Among the Thugs follows a group of Manchester United supporters as they make like modern-day Huns (or, more accurately, Angles, Saxons and Jutes), pillaging and terrorizing a large swath of Europe as well as England itself.
What makes Among the Thugs superlative is Buford’s access and the depth of his study of the group. His achievement easily rivals Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, which also reveals the inner workings of a near-mythical and terrifying human force. But Thugs outshines Hell’s Angels with the vividness and clarity of Buford’s writing. Not only was Buford enmeshed in this gang, but reading his book, you feel like you’re there as well.
Now, fifteen years after Thugs, Buford has published Heat, and although it covers an entirely different topic, Buford makes it almost as engrossing, if nowhere near as shocking, as his study of hooliganism.
Heat’s subtitle is “An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany,” which only just begins to scratch the surface of the ground Buford covers here, neglecting to mention the generous helpings of food history and travel writing Heat offers.
It all begins innocently enough: Buford throws a dinner party for a friend’s birthday. Said friend is also friends with Mario Batali, the hyperanimated celebrity chef from Babbo, a three- (and nearly four-) star restaurant in New York City. Buford invites Batali, Batali takes over the cooking duties from Buford, merriment ensues.
What follows is Buford’s total immersion in the life of a New York City chef. He goes to work in Babbo’s kitchen, as a slave, and learns the intricate details of everything from making pasta to doing line work in the insanely fast-paced kitchen.
Once again, Buford has managed to get access to a world that looms large in the public imagination. Batali is the host of Molto Mario on the Food Network, a line of Batali-branded food products, cookbooks, restaurants, and whatever else you might imagine. In short, Mario is a leading figurehead of the new food revolution, this new American passion for cooking that has created a million amateur chefs with sub-zero refrigerators and industrial stoves in suburban McMansions. And Buford got in there — for free.
Well, not entirely for free. The life of a kitchen slave is stressful, hot, greasy and rife with myriad physical and social dangers. But as Buford himself is repeatedly reminded: many thousands of aspiring chefs would kill to take his spot on the line, so he’d best earn his place there.
Which brings us to where Heat differs from Thugs. We can safely assume that Buford, founding editor of the marvelous literary journal Granta and former fiction editor at the New Yorker (more on which below), was not exactly a hobbyist or admirer of football hooligans. Rather, as a visitor to England, Buford found himself enthralled by the idea, and the resulting book was as much to satisfy his curiosity as it was a creative endeavor.
But with Heat, we learn straight off that Buford is an enthusiastic home chef, and that inviting Molto Mario to a dinner party was only the best — or, quite possibly, worst — idea he’d yet had in his hobby. But Buford’s already well-developed passion for cooking is what drives Heat. From Babbo, Buford travels to Italy to learn the old ways of cooking Italian food, delves deep into the history of food, the history of Italy (the two are intimately connected, of course), and indentures himself to more than just Mario.
As captivating a character as Mario Batali is, Heat drags a bit when Buford digs into the Mario Story. As much as Mario’s story becomes Buford’s own story — Buford is following in Mario’s footsteps, and hidden in his shadow throughout the book — Mario is not exactly in dire need of any help on the P.R. front. Fortunately, Buford uses Mario’s experience as a leaping-off point for any number of revelatory experiences; witness especially his description of an eight-course feast in 1560, which included no fewer than 1,347 different dishes. Following Buford’s increasing engagement with the world of professional cooking is part of the vicarious joy that Heat offers — Buford actually steps down as fiction editor for the New Yorker in order to continue his studies in Italy. That, dear readers, is dedication.
All the words I could string together (and I’ve certainly pushed the envelope again here) won’t possibly convey how enjoyable Heat is. But let me just say that even me, a devout non-meat-eating foodie who publishes cookbooks every year, was thoroughly engrossed by a book that starts with Mario Batali feeding dinner guests strips of raw pig fat. With Heat, Buford has once again stretched my perceptions of the possible, and given me an entirely new outlook on cooking.
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 1996)
Have you ever seen a movie based on a book and then gone on to read that book? Have you ever enjoyed the book as much as the film? I can’t think of a single instance that I have. There are plenty of movies that have done right by their book versions, but the largest part of the joy of reading (for me, at least) is inhabiting the book’s world: picturing the characters as you imagine them, identifying yourself with them or against them, and living the plot as they do. A movie can’t give you that richness, and reading a book at a snail’s pace after witnessing Hollywood’s hyperkinetic treatment is almost always unrewarding.
You can take, as an extreme example, the series of Harry Potter films. My distaste for America’s hype-machine steered me clear of the first four books or so, but family obligations led me to seeing the first two films — which, in short, were awfully bad. Creating a film from even the relatively short books at the front end of the series proved a daunting challenge for Chris Columbus: both films viewed like a series of plot points with little interconnective tissue. Of course, the third film was a vast improvement, both because director Alfonso Cuarón took the helm, but also because I’d by then read the books and could fill in the blanks between plot points.
This is all a (very) roundabout way of saying that I saw the film “High Fidelity” when it was released in 2000, thinking I’d never read the books. It was a fine film, bittersweet, full of attractive and endearing people, clever writing, Jack Black, the Beta Band, etc.
Then I started reading The Believer, the McSweeney’s magazine that features the consistently greatest column in the history of writing: Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” After a couple years of reading the column and living with his unique voice and fascinating take on writing and writers, I found High Fidelity used and decided to give it a go.
Unfortunately, it was as good as the film, or my having already seen the film limited how much I could enjoy the book. I’m not a particularly attentive filmgoer, but I nonetheless found myself anticipating specific plot developments pages if not chapters before they occured. The ending? Not a surprise, or even as enjoyable as in the film. The writing? Good, but again, the film managed to convey the tone and style admirably well.
I guess this means that the film version was excellent, faithful beyond a doubt to the source material. What it means for me is that the book suffered because of its filmic treatment. So what I’m left with from the book is this utterly interesting question Hornby raises in this tale of a depressed, adrift and aging record-shop owner, dealing with the wreckage of his life, his loves and sad, sad music: “Am I sad because I listen to this music? Or do I listen to this music because I’m sad?”
It’s a fascinating conundrum for all of us sad-music lovers in the world. However, we may never learn the answer to this question, and instead we will drown it out with our Nick Drake albums, our Elliott Smith albums, our Leonard Cohen albums, and so forth. and in the meantime, I’ll be avoiding Hornby’s book About A Boy, which film I’ve also already seen (and which was an altogether more enjoyable film than “High Fidelity”), and move on, perhaps, to Fever Pitch, which film version I know I’ll never see, loath as I am to encounter Drew Barrymore’s style of “acting” ever again.
