A Year in Reading: Ben Lerner

We’re all familiar of a certain stereotype of literary fiction as a category of beautiful homework reading, often characterized by stiffening description, upper-middle class liberalism, and a nutritious but often un-fun writing style written with what Virginia Woolf referred to as a brass pen. Things are even worse for so-called multicultural literature, relegated as it often is to what novelist Amitava Kumar has called “the ghetto of identity” and typically thought of as sentimental, auto-exotifying, and irrelevant. While my line of work typically precludes me from picking favorites—I’m the head of a literary arts nonprofit called The Asian American Writers’ Workshop—it often seems to me that the mode for many Asian American writers is less memoiristic or dramatic than comic. I’m thinking of a number of recent books that are linguistically playful, compulsively readable, and, you might say, somewhat agnostic when it comes to matters of race, such as Ed Park’s Personal Days, Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, Ed Lin’s This Is A Bust, Sesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook, and Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects, among many others. Two books in this category—Monica Ferrell’s The Answer Is Always Yes and H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy—both follow their picaresque, if somewhat tentative, protagonists on their quest for cultural cachet, boozy good times, and, more equivocally, young love in New York. These exuberant novels are field guides to New York subcultures of the recently expired present—the ‘90s club scene and the weeks after 9/11, respectively—and drip with pop cultural, status-conscious, anthropological detail. (You could call them the nerdy poet wing of lad lit.) They do a good job depicting one of the virtues of life in New York: its wonderful unpleasantness, as espied in the perpetually unshaven, hungover, nocturnal state of their main characters. What if Nabokov wrote a college movie? Monica Ferrell’s The Answer Is Always Yes tells the story of NYU freshman Matt Acciaccatura, a closet nerd desperate to become cool, who inexplicably ends up as the promoter at one of the hottest clubs in New York. Yes is about coolness, which seems 1) dubious and manufactured, 2) asymptotically out of reach and sought only by unhealthy climbers, and 3) a state of ecstasy. This is probably the only novel that documents both that word’s eponymous pharmaceutical twin in millennial rave culture and the word’s mystic etymology: ecstasy refers to a state of rapturous displacement from one’s own body. As Matt learns, no one can live in a state of ecstasy (or coolness) for long. While he’s often an angry and neurotic striver, as brand name-conscious as Madame Bovary and disempowered as a teen shooter, the novel seems secretly about something more innocent: the less adventurous realm not of ecstasy, but of happiness—ephemeral, lyrical, mundane. Huck Finn via global youth culture and post-9/11 detention, Home Boy follows Shehzad nee Chuck who occupies the three roles of the South Asian man in the American imagination: he starts the novel as a finance worker, spends the middle as a taxi driver, and by the end is detained by the Federal government under suspicions of terrorism. Chuck, like most of the characters in the novel, possesses two names, signaling his dial allegiances to both the Asia of Nusrat tunes, the verses of Faiz, and transcontinental flights to Karachi and to the America of the Big Apple, The Great Gatsby, and gangsta rap. At one point someone calls Chuck a “homeboy”—which immediately makes him question his ethnic allegiances, like a neurotic Roth narrator. Yet I think the novel’s point is that ethnicity is not an overriding kingdom that trumps other parts of our identity. Rather, the lava of culture—the novels and poems we love, our favorite beers and pop songs—creeps over everything and accretes into our personality. The constant detritus of culture gives the novel a Bellow-sian capaciousness (here’s the diction of the opening page: boulevardiers, dialectic, postcolonial, Telemundo, crazy motherfucker, Big Butt), which represents an attempt to swallow a Baedeker of old school rhymes, barfly one-liners, and diasporic factoids into the American vocabulary. More from A Year in Reading

Bonny Wolf is the author of Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and Other Kitchen Stories (St Martins, 2006), the host of Kitchen Window, NPR's food podcast; a commentator for NPR's Weekend Edition; and a food columnist for The Washington Post. More information is available at www.bonnywolf.com.Julia Child and Judith Jones both went to Paris for the first time in 1948, beginning a journey that changed their lives and the way Americans cook."It's quite possible that we passed Judith and Evan (her husband) on the street, or that we stood next to each other at a cocktail party, for we were leading parallel lives," Child writes in her memoir My Life in France. "But we never met in Paris."They didn't learn of each other until the summer of 1959 when a huge manuscript on French cooking by Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle landed on Jones' desk at Knopf where she was an editor."I was bouleversee, as the French say - knocked out," Jones writes in her memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. "This was the book I'd been searching for."My Life in France was published in 2006, two years after Child's death at age 91. Her grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme, put together the story of her formative time in France from conversations with her, letters, notes and photographs, many taken by her husband Paul.The two memoirs make a lovely couple. Together, a clear picture emerges of the somewhat appalling food scene in the U.S. after World War II and how much these two women - after a few years in Paris - effected change.Their voices are different: Jones is reserved and private while Child is exuberant and forthright. Their stories, however, are similar. Both grew up in homes with hired cooks and were educated at eastern women's colleges (Smith for Child, Bennington for Jones). Both married older men who they considered soulmates and neither couple had children. Both women fell in love with France and its food, and both believed home cooking could be excellent.Jones went on to bring out books by many important food writers including Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis and Marion Cunningham. She was also the editor of literary figures such as John Updike and Anne Tyler.Her publishing career began when she pulled from the reject pile Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. All of this is part of the story told in The Tenth Muse. (The 19th-century French gourmet Brillat-Savarin called food the 10th muse.)Julia Child, of course, went on to become Julia Child. My Life in France is a wonderful window through which to look at how she went from, in her words, "a six-foot-two-inch ... rather loud and unserious Californian" to the meticulous cook who taught Americans how to cook like the French.More from A Year in Reading 2007