Next v. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
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SEMIFINALS
Next
v. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Judged by John Roderick
John Roderick is currently the lead singer and guitarist in the band The Long Winters. His first book of extremely short prose, Electric Aphorisms, was published in November 2009. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None!”
Contrasting the two novels, Next by James Hynes, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender seemed like it should be an easy task. In the first few pages Hynes introduced a callow, insecure male protagonist obsessed with sex and reflecting back on his life in a climate of modern anxiety, while Bender produced a thoughtful but guarded young female protagonist trapped in a dysfunctional family and fixated on food. Thank God contemporary fiction is moving beyond sweeping gender stereotypes, I thought.
But my eye-rolling was quickly subverted by the inventive plotting of Lemon Cake, and although Next didn’t stray too far from its template of middle-aged identity crisis, it was suspenseful and ripe with artful language. Both featured unexpected twists in their closing chapters, and both toyed knowingly with the literary tropes at their respective cores.
As a middle-aged, college-educated, unmarried man I am surely the target audience of Next. Like a conversation with an old and boastful friend at a reunion dinner, Next leavens its ribald male swagger with broad strokes of progressive sensitivity, aware that in order to call a spade a spade certain niceties are required. Kevin Quinn, a book editor in his fifties, is passing time before a job interview in Austin by stalking an Asian hipster girl he met on the plane down from his home in Ann Arbor, reflecting wryly on his past lovers as he trails this seductive stranger. Like most media-savvy people of his generation, he orders his world by reflexively and compulsively referencing pop-culture at every opportunity, even in his inner monologue, taking his encyclopedic knowledge to be proof of his wit. Here’s Kevin glimpsing the skyline of Austin for the first time:
One building is much taller than the others…The tower glints icily in the sun, looking slightly unreal and miniature and menacing, the lair of a Bond villain…Or perhaps it’s a corporate Barad-dur, the four icy panels concealing a huge, fiery red eye with a slit like a cat’s, ready to cast its baleful light on the hapless residents of Austin.
Hynes references The Lord of the Rings without further explanation—he knows his readers all get it, and get the implied link between a skyscraper and the Dark Tower too. But Hynes doesn’t mean us to see his main character’s fanboy reveries as character attributes or flaws, because his third-person narrator speaks the same way, weaving reference after reference into every setting and description in a kind of hepcat-speak that kept pulling me out of the story. By the time Kevin Quinn started encountering real difficulty in the last few chapters I had lost my ability to empathize with him, seeing him only as a proxy for the author’s own nostalgia.
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Despite its transparent, first-person style, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake has such a flat affect that the first couple of chapters breezed by weightlessly. Set in residential Hollywood in the haze of the recent past, we’re introduced to a cheerily unhappy middle-class family through the eyes of Rose, an eight-year-old girl who all of a sudden can taste emotions in her food, specifically the emotions of the cooks that prepared it. When I read this, I sighed in resignation. Half the cashiers at Whole Foods probably claim to have this talent. I braced for long passages waxing gastronomic as the poor little girl learns she can only eat food made with love, and I hoped I wouldn’t gag on the sanctimony. But as the story unfolded, far from adopting a preachy tone about organic meat and locally sourced produce, Aimee Bender has Rose resort to eating factory-processed junk food in search of something emotionally inert. Bravo.
Rose is a dispassionate narrator, trapped rather than empowered by her gift. Largely ignored by her mother in favor of her brooding older brother, she has no one to confide in except her brother’s gifted friend George, whose interest in her is merely polite. The characters are all wallowing in what at first seems like unremarkable suburban malaise. Rose’s creative, unfulfilled mother and unconvincingly cheerful and clueless lawyer father are the stuff of 10,000 sitcom pilots, with Rose’s unrevealed talent the only thing to rise above the level of cliché. But gradually a feeling of claustrophobia takes over. Something uneasy, even malevolent, is lurking in this family’s unspoken secrets.
The tension builds in a satisfying way until, in the final third of the book, Bender’s magical realism verges into the queasily surreal. Rose’s family is supernaturally over-sensitive to other people’s suffering, but each bears their burden alone while pretending to be normal. Her brother Joseph—spoiler alert—has arduously trained himself to disappear, or dissolve into a chair, (it’s unclear which) to escape the normal pressures of life, and his final disappearance sends the family sprawling. But his actual dissolution is so confusingly portrayed, and his motivation for such an extreme action so hard to fathom, that the book becomes somewhat cold-hearted. Is his self-abnegation a metaphor for introspection? Autism? If so, it’s barefaced and artless. Is his teleportation(?) also a misused gift like Rose’s, a superpower that went unrecognized until it became a handicap? If so, a lot more energy could have gone into exploring that idea. The conceit of an emotionally closed-off narrator is a bold choice, and it’s testimony to Bender’s writing prowess that I cared about the coping strategies of a family struggling to stay dead inside, but in the end more information was needed. The story wanted more heart.
Despite its at times suffocating obscurity, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was ultimately an enjoyable read. Aimee Bender’s characters were well conceived and presented without overt comment. While Next had many pleasures, James Hynes gave in too easily to the temptation to blast his wit from a blunderbuss. Had his character alone done the pontificating, his omniscient narrator might not have worn out his welcome too soon.
Advancing:
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: This one is going to cause some waves in the commentariat. In my completely informal surveying of the post-match postings, I think The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake has come in for the least amount of love. Next has had its detractors as well, but Lemon Cake has taken a cuffing. One commenter (Sophronisba) went so far as to say, “If it (Lemon Cake) beats Next, I may have to reexamine my own literary worldview.”
I have felt precious little of this kind of pain during this year’s tournament, that peculiar feeling of wondering what I might be missing, of a book passing me by completely. At the start, I said how many of these books I enjoyed, and there’s only one (Finkler) that I wouldn’t recommend.
In 2009, you and I waged a lonely campaign as just about the only people not won over by 2666, and each successive round, we were further chastised for failing to get with the program. I really remember feeling out on a limb each time 2666 came back around and knowing we’d have to talk about it again and anticipating the backlash. It was always friendly backlash, but it really made me question my own taste and reading abilities. One of the most pleasurable aspects of reading in general and the ToB in particular is that while it’s a solo enterprise, afterwards there’s a communal aspect—in this case, our own month-long book club. Being able to talk about books with others is one of the best reasons to read a book. My favorite part of teaching is always the experience of just talking about books or stories with my students, seeing the texts differently as they’re interpreted through their eyes. I mentioned earlier that I’d assigned Super Sad True Love Story for my contemporary literature course and my appreciation for the book has risen significantly as I’ve thought about it more and more deeply as I read my students’ responses to the book.
To feel left out of that begins to sting a little bit.
One thing we don’t have this year is a truly “challenging” book. Nox is unusual, but it takes less than an hour to digest (at least the first time). Freedom and Skippy Dies are long, but very straightforward in terms of form and execution. Every year the tournament is missing something because it’s impossible to include everything, and maybe the thing we’re missing this year is that big, unwieldy tome.
Kevin: I wouldn’t have guessed going in that The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake would be one of the most polarizing books in the tourney, but you’re right. There is, as you say, some hate for it going on in the comments, but it finished quite high in the Zombie poll, in which we asked readers to pick their favorite book entered in the ToB. And it has been extremely successful in head-to-head matchups, today breezing past Next into the Zombie Round.
This tournament really is missing a juggernaut. Freedom seems to have had an air of inevitability from the get-go, and it has been up to the challenge, vanquishing both the number one and number two reader picks in our Zombie poll. (I don’t think I’m giving away company secrets by disclosing the fact that if Goon Squad had defeated Freedom yesterday, Skippy Dies would have survived into the Zombie round.) But even as it is widely liked, it really doesn’t seem to be a book that inspires a lot of passion. Or it hasn’t after the first giant exhale of hype.
Is there a big, ugly, monster of a book from 2010 that we could have unleashed on the tourney this year? David Mitchell had a celebrated novel out, but it too was kind of traditional. Personally, I thought this was a great year for fiction, but there wasn’t that one book that had everyone at each other’s throats for the love or hate of it. Lemon Cake is no 2666 in that regard. Even the controversy over Franzen was about everything but his book. Maybe Adam Levin’s The Instructions might have offered some of that—it’s certainly ambitious and has many fans—but I don’t know that the level of passion surrounding it is overheated.
Is there some bullshit conclusion we can come to about this apparent lack of collective literary ambition? What does the fact that we are publishing (and reading) such conventional narratives about our times say about our times? Is this a business malaise or a cultural one? Or is my premise completely off base?
John: I’m going to go with none of the above. I think it’s a fluke. In addition to The Instructions we have Witz by Joshua Cohen, another doorstop about Jewish identity. If we’d included both of those books, we’d be talking about a different trend right now.
Coming out next year we have David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which looks plenty challenging. We also have Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 (which is 984 pages and was published in multiple volumes in Japan), and The Marriage Plot from Jeffrey Eugenides. The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño (the Tupac of publishing) is currently being serialized in the Paris Review, and will be published in book form in November.
I don’t know that any of these are a lock for the tourney, but if they make it, we could be talking about the year of the experimental maximalists.
Kevin: So the final Zombie results are in and Room and A Visit From the Goon Squad, the top two vote-getters in our reader poll, get a second chance to make it to the final round, where all the judges in the tourney, plus C. Max Magee of The Millions, will weigh in on a final vote.
But first we must address a situation that we’ve never encountered before at the ToB. Freedom has already faced and bested both of our Zombie books. A rematch is inevitable one way or the other. After a hasty discussion, we decided that since Freedom just faced Goon Squad in the semifinals (and since the book that made it farther in the tourney should have the more beneficial seeding), the Zombie pairings will be Freedom versus Room (tomorrow) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake versus A Visit From the Goon Squad (Thursday).
We’re going to take one more breather from competition on Friday to look back on the semis and Zombies and look ahead to the championship. We’ll also be holding a little contest Friday, so watch for that.
The Rooster gets a new home on Monday.
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