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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Recently, there was an exchange in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement about the presence, and the propriety, of recipes in novels, and we intend to settle the questions that have arisen there in the American way, right now, and for good. There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.
Most books that have food in them, including the classic nineteenth-century novels, have the first kind of food. In one Trollope novel after another, three meals a day, the parsons and politicians eat chops or steaks or mutton, but the dishes are essentially interchangeable, mere stops on the ribbon of narrative, signs of life and social transactions rather than specific pleasures: "Mr. Peregrine greatly enjoyed his chop" or "For Dr. Patterson, even the usual satisfaction he took in his beefsteak and porter was somewhat diminished by this thought"--such food provides space for a moment of reflection. The dishes are the Styrofoam peanuts in the packaging of classic narrative. There are moments in Trollope when what a character drinks matters--claret good or bad, porter or port--but his food is, in every sense, at the service of his story.
Next come the writers who dish up very particular food to their characters to show who they are. Proust is this kind of writer, and Henry James is, too. Proust seems so full of food--crushed strawberries and madeleines, tisanes and champagne--that entire recipe books have been extracted from his texts. But he's not a greedy writer; that his people are eating lobster or veal matters to how they feel about who they are, but we are not meant to leave the page hungry. Proust will say that someone is eating a meal of gigot with sauce bearnaise, but he seldom says that the character had a delicious meal of gigot with sauce bearnaise--although he will extend his adjectives to the weather, or the view. He uses food as a sign of something else. (It's what social novelists, even mystically minded ones, always do: J. D. Salinger doesn't like food, either, but the fact that his characters are eating snails or Swiss-cheese sandwiches tells so much about them that it must be noted, and felt, like every other detail.)
Then, there are writers who are so greedy that they go on at length about the things their characters...
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