Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

A few weeks ago, I knew Anthony Bourdain mostly as the bad-boy TV foodie who eviscerated Top Chef contestants, and the guy responsible for the awesome mac and cheese at Les Halles. Now I know him as an entertaining writer and official cute boy magnet. To wit, a conversation I had on the subway while reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:

Cute guy: I see you're reading Bourdain. And marking the pages. [He gestures to my heavily post-it-flagged copy of the book] Are you thinking of becoming a chef?
Me: Nope, I just like to keep track of what I'm reading.
CG: Too bad. Bourdain was part of what inspired me to become a chef...

Then we had a lovely conversation about how the book was advanced for its time (2000) by having very foodie themes before the trend really hit. Two minutes later, I got off at my usual morning stop. But yay for surprising book conversations--and attractive guys on the R train (trust me, it's rare).

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the book.

Kitchen Confidential isn't the best organized memoir you'll find, or the most dramatic. What it does have is an honest love for the hustle and burn of the restaurant kitchen, and a "fuck it all" openness. Bourdain doesn't take himself too seriously (or at least he didn't eight years ago), and is very willing to talk about his humiliations as a young line cook, his unheroic recovery from heroin addiction, and the various reasons why you should never order fish on a Monday.

It's also a strange, roundabout tour of restaurant culture in New York City. Bourdain worked in just about every kind of restaurant with just about every kind of kitchen person--a UN of sous chefs, petty criminals (who just happen to be transcendent bakers), nutcases, brilliant chefs, and union shills. You've gotta hand it to a book that makes you feel so repelled by the kitchens of even high-end restaurants, but simultaneously makes you crave good cuisine no matter who's doing what with unrefrigerated seafood.

Side note: The book also spawned a short-lived sitcom with the same name and theme, but with a much more, y'know, sitcom-y vibe. Also highly recommended, but for different reasons. Anyway, I suggest checking it out on Hulu if you're so inclined.

Some tidbits from the top chef himself:

"I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second)."

"My naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the 'lactose intolerant' and the cooking of Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network."
[Respectful editorial note: apparently the naked contempt DID get him a show on Food Network, but I digress.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?

If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is light on Sedaris family doings. It relies instead on the kind of stories you turn to when you've known someone forever, and don't need to discuss the big stuff anymore. He talks about his partner, his job, and daily struggles to quit smoking and interact with normal people. At this point, he seems to be going on trips (there are two airplane stories) and learning new languages just to be able to write about it. Some of the essays have distinctly enhanced qualities, but at this point I don't care if stuff is fudged. I just want him to churn out his patented funny-poignant essay collections every few years.

Some of the pieces are familiar. My favorite, "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," was in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. But somehow even the recycled essays feel fresher, brighter than in the magazine. It may be the fresh, bright paper. Or the fact that I'm predisposed to love anything I've seen in the New Yorker. Either way, definitely worth the $15 on Amazon. (Even David Sedaris can't get me to pay full cover price.)

Favored parts:

"And there's an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no facelift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have killed me to take her crutches into consideration."

"In the grocery section of a Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars--you could almost buy a chicken for that."

"It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life."

The Updike of holiday weekends

A few months ago, The Sportswriter protagonist Frank Bascombe kinda pissed me off, with his poor decisions and his even poorer relationships. This morning, I found his creator to be considerably more charming. Richard Ford was a featured segment on CBS Sunday Morning (the drowsy, pleasant alternative to the Chris Matthews-style browbeating on Sunday mornings).

And it's hard not to like a guy who waxes rhapsodic about real estate: "The language of real estate is all about the language of people's hopes for where they live, how much they feel their house is worth and therefore, how much they feel themselves to be worth."

Also, I'd like to point out that Ford and his wife argue over the word "azure." Good to know that petty squabbles over word choice still happen after the honeymoon is over.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

When I was a really young kid, my dad worked shifts. And when he'd do overnight ones, he'd always come home at 7 in the morning, just as Sam and I were getting up and ready for school. Dad would always have something in hand when we swarmed him at the door--sometimes donuts (the sprinkled kind, of course), but more often comic books. I loved them. For me, Dad usually picked the girly ones. Casper, Archie and company, and the occasional Wonder Woman. Sam got all the traditional "boy" ones. But four-year-old Sam wasn't really the reading type, so I was the one who ended up devouring all the comics as soon as they came in--Betty, Veronica, and Spider Man alike.

That was more than twenty years ago, though, and I can't say I've thought much about superhero comic books since. That's probably why I didn't expect to feel super-connected to the subject matter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I picked up the book based on the idea that I should be reading Michael Chabon, combined with a shiny Pulitzer sticker on the cover. ('Cause I'm a cover sticker sucker, let's face it.) But I ended up loving it.

The novel moves around Sammy Klayman, a 19-year-old Brooklyn polio survivor with tons of comic book ideas but no way of cashing in on them; and his cousin Josef Kavalier, a Czechoslovakian immigrant sent to America by his parents just as the Nazi occupation hit Prague. Joe's talents include magic tricks and Houdini-esque escape tricks, but his only marketable skill when he shows up at Sammy's door is a significant drawing talent. Soon, the "boy geniuses" are pitching their respective drawing and writing skills to Sammy's boss, the owner of a company that sells novelties like whoopee cushions and tiny defective radios. 1939 New York is their oyster, as the Amazing Midget Radio Comics are quickly outshone by their star, the boys' creation: the Escapist.

The Escapist becomes a huge, Superman-like hit. The former whoopee cushion salesman makes millions off the copyright while the boys make a tiny fraction of that, but they're content enough as the brains and minor celebrities behind Empire Comics. Nothing is particularly solid, however, in an industry dependent on the whims of American kids. And the guys have their own self-destructive streaks. Sammy struggles with his homosexuality, not the easiest thing in the pre-war era. And Joe feels massive guilt about abandoning his Jewish family to the Nazis' mercy. He sublimates the guilt by saving money to bring them over, and by picking fights with every German he can find in the five boroughs. Any pleasure he finds wracks him, even his sweet relationship with a spunky young artist. So yeah. The party doesn't last long, but somehow it keeps Kavalier and Clay going, through the War and into the bleak 1950s.

Probably the best part of the book is the translation of comic book style into the novel format. The whole thing is highly episodic, from Joe's complicated escape-from-Czechoslovakia story (it involves the Golem of Prague, but not in a way you might expect); to Sammy's, umm, awakening in the ruins of the World Fair with a handsome actor who plays the Escapist on the radio; to Joe's wartime antics as a prototypical soldier-with-nothing-to-lose. The language is highly illustrative, without a single picture anywhere in the book. And the pacing is amazing: the timeline skips around enough so that everything moves along, but Chabon gives so much descriptive detail that you don't feel like you're missing anything. The result is page-turning tension, without being overwrought.

It's not just the structure. The story itself is heavy on comic book mythology: the wish-fulfillment of costumed superheroes who overcome physical weakness (which Sammy can't do) and save the world's persecuted from evil (which Joe can't do). It adds a neat heft to all the characters.

At the same time, it's a shout-out to all the guys who really did bring characters like the Escapist to life. All of Empire's comic book competitors are real (everyone wants the next Superman), and names like Stan Lee pop up every now and then. Orson Welles is there briefly. So it's a cool picture of underground artistry in 1930s/40s New York, too.

Anyway, this is another one I could talk about endlessly if given the chance (where's the book club when you need it?), but who's got the time? I might have a night full of heroic crime-fighting ahead of me.

Parts I liked:

"As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation....It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned to fake."

[on watching the sudden appearance of "the Escapist" on the outside of the Empire State Building]
"There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder."

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the back cover of On Beauty, there's a New York Times blurb: "wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed...a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

You know, I never thought I'd agree with Michiko Kakutani, but....

I really loved On Beauty. It might even be on the elusive list of favorites. At the very least, it's near the top of the book club picks. (No offense, James Joyce and William Faulkner.) Zadie Smith's third novel is so full of character detail, fantastic descriptive language, and genuine charm that it's easy to overlook any small flaws. You can barely even see the behind-the-scenes conceit, that it's a modern reworking of Howards End. In the hands of a lot of other authors, that skeleton would be painfully obvious, like dubbing southern accents over a Merchant Ivory film. Here, it's more of a pleasant realization that you're seeing something vaguely familiar, but still refreshing. Think West Side Story.

The book channels its Bloomsbury-era inspiration by exploring whether it's possible to break class barriers (even when your intentions are good), and looking at the small legacies we leave one another. It's set in academia (a Boston-area college that's like pretty much every college/liberal arts department we've all known and loved), and focuses on the Belsey family. The father, Howard, is an art history professor, a British expat, who gets off on university politics much more than on Rembrandt. His African-American wife, Kiki, is his feisty conscience. Their grown kids are born-again Christian Jerome, obnoxious college student Zora, and adolescent Levi, who wants to identify with ghetto kids despite his very middle-class family. They love each other, but they're not the happiest bunch. Howard recently cheated on Kiki with a family friend (and not a one-night stand floozy, as he told his wife). They're not really separated, but not really talking much, either. The kids are isolated, too: no one takes Jerome's Christianity, or any of his emotions, seriously; Zora is completely absorbed in her own little quest to dominate Wellington College politics; and Levi is getting deeper and deeper with a group of unhappy Haitian immigrants, while still pretending that he's going to school and holding down a weekend job. Plus, the family's nemeses, a rival British family headed by a Clarence Thomas-type who once insulted Howard in an academic throwdown, is moving in down the street.

The main plot of the story involves the Belseys moving outward and engaging both the upper class (the rival professor, Monty Kipps) and the lower (Carl, a talented kid from the Roxbury projects with a knack for poetry). The latter becomes part of a campus tug-of-war over affirmative action, and whether kids who aren't paying tuition through the nose can sit in on poetry seminars. The Conservative bootstrap effort is led by Kipps, while his wife and daughter fraternize heavily with the Belsey enemies. Meanwhile, Howard just wants tenure--but his wounded professional pride and his unfortunate libido keep him right in the miserable middle with everyone else. The crumbling marriage is the backdrop for all the chaotic dealings going on outside their house.

This indictment of academia is exactly what I expected/wanted from White Noise, and just didn't get. You don't need absurdism to highlight a system that's already absurd. You just have to describe it well, and Smith does that. She hits all the right character notes, too. Even less fleshed characters, like Jerome and Carlene Kipps (whose bond with Kiki pushes the plot along in very technical ways), don't feel too awkward. Other characters are spot-on--like Zora's pushy Lisa Simpson-ism as overcompensation for physical insecurities. And the poet/professor Claire, whose 60s-style politics and blithe narcissism reminded me of half the English professors I had in college.

But more than anything, I really loved Smith's prose. She has an amazing way of distilling the essence of things into a sentence or two that smacks you right in the face with its accuracy. By the end of the book, I wasn't even tired of the Belseys. I'd gladly read follow-up stories about them. Maybe not another whole novel, but some short stuff in the New Yorker or something. And I enjoyed this one much more than White Teeth. I look forward to what Smith comes up with next.

It was hard to pick favorite parts, but since it would be a shame to waste the Post-It flags littering my copy....

"Jerome said, 'It's like, a family doesn't work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?' Kiki's kids always seemed to say 'you know' at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd."

"Mozart's Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins."

"God knows, even the story he ended up giving--a one-night stand with a stranger--had caused terrible damage. It broke that splendid circle of Kiki's love, within which he had existed for so long, a love (and it was to Howard's credit that he knew this) that had enabled everything else."

David Sedaris at Union Square Barnes & Noble

"If you read a story in Esquire and don't like it, there might be something wrong with the story. If you read a story in the New Yorker and don't like it, there's something wrong with you."

Tonight I saw David Sedaris kick off his latest book tour at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. This is a victory, make no mistake. I have been trying for years to see Sedaris read live. There's always been a fatal scheduling conflict, or sold-out tickets. And my favorite consolation prize, a signed copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day procured by one of my favorite people, sits on my shelf in a place of honor. But I was never able to get to any of the events in Connecticut or Boston.

So today I left work and headed straight to Union Square, well in advance of the 7:00 start time. And I'm so glad I did--not only did I get one of the last seats available and bond with my neighbors, but Sedaris showed up an hour and a half early (!) just to sign books. I decided not to wait in line, but it was still extremely impressive. Even the store employees seemed nonplussed. Usually authors push through the reading, wearily answer some questions, and sigh through the signing line. I've never seen a writer voluntarily show up ahead of time to accommodate more people.

The reading itself was fantastic--probably the best I've ever attended. Sedaris was more energetic, more attractive, and more charming than I expected--definitely more so than he comes across on camera, or even on radio. He read one of the essays from When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and then some hilarious bits from his personal diary. Did I mention the energy? He just kept going. If there weren't eight million more people waiting for signatures after the talk, I'm pretty sure he would have kept plowing through silly jokes and the snippets from his journal.

And the questions were--get this--tolerable. Not a single person asked what his inspiration/influences are. That, my friends, is unprecedented. Unprecedented! The epigraph above came in response to someone's question about how his writing style has changed now that he's been published so much and in so many different places. It was cute.

The whole event was great from start to finish. It also sets the bar high for the next reading to come along. It's probably just as well that I won't be able to go to see Salman Rushdie tomorrow. Fatwa drama is such a downer.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.

Sloane Crosley Redux

So continuing our new hobby of Timely Literary Jaunts, SPG and I caught a reading by Sloane Crosley (whom you may remember from last week, or, umm, right below, if this is still on the main blog page). She and Keith Gessen were speaking at Court Books in Brooklyn, in support of their respective first books.

It didn't do much to dispel the theory that we could totally be writing and promoting books like these ourselves as twentysomething editors. But unfounded bitterness aside, it was fun. The whole thing had a fun publishing insider vibe: tiny venue, book publicist/editor authors, young crowd. In fact, the crowd was SO young that the first question came from an actual six-year-old: "How did you make your book?" Good question, kid. She saved us all from having to ask the same thing, even though she was clearly a plant by her Gessen-editor father. Very shrewd!

The next big author event should be a little less intimate and more chaotic: David Sedaris at Union Square. (Yay!)

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

I put a lot of thought into various "what-if" scenarios--especially morbid, what-happens-if-I'm-hit-by-a-bus-today ones. (Not that this stops me from leaving my bed unmade some mornings, or stuffing yet another bag of junk in my closet.) I like to think it's part of my unique charm. So imagine the intrigue when I started reading Sloane Crosley's new collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and was greeted with the following sentences:

Back in the apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed. The day I get shot in a bodega (buying cigarettes, naturally) will in all likelihood be the day before laundry Sunday and the day after I decided to clean out my closet, got bored halfway through, and opted to watch sitcoms in my prom dress instead.

I was hit by three simultaneous thoughts:

1. I could have written this.
2. I did not write this. Curse you, procrastination!
3. Sloane Crosley and I should probably be neurotic BFFs.

Every so often, a book or magazine piece comes along and reminds me that I spent a lot of money on a quasi MFA, and haven't written anything since. But on the bright side, someone's keeping it real for all the urban twentysomething navel-gazers. Crosley's book is a hilarious collection of suburban childhood trauma (or what passes for trauma in happy Westchester kids) and highlights of Generation Y adulthood.

A giant blurb on the front cover has Jonathan Lethem proclaiming that Crosley is from the "realm of Sedaris and Vowell." And while that's technically true, it gives everyone involved some short shrift. Crosley is witty like Sedaris. Except female. And straight. And young. The overlap with Vowell is even more narrow: both are female and funny. Picking the two most popular humor essayists may be a good sales hook, but it's getting old. Why not just throw in Augusten Burroughs, too, for the memoir trifecta?

For the most part, Crosley lives up to the blurb. The essays are self-deprecating and merciless. She moves pretty smoothly between the childish (summer camp) and adult (wanting to have a one-night stand because it always seemed so glamorous), so that it's all one big post-adolescent blur.

So rather than grumble about someone else writing the book I was too lazy to write, I suppose I should show some love for the many parts I liked:

"Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up identifying with nothing. Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor."

"I'm not exactly sure how the ponies happened. Though I have an inkling: 'Can I get you anything?' I'll say, getting up from a dinner table, 'Coffee, tea, a pony?' People rarely laugh at this, especially if they've heard it before. 'This party's supposed to be fun,' a friend will say. 'Really?' I'll respond, 'Will there be pony rides?' It's a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it's hard to weed out of my speech--most of the time I don't even realize I'm saying it. There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with our personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.

I don't even like ponies."

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian-Americans. It's a fact. And a lot of critics (as well as one audience member at her Strand reading two weeks ago) take issue with it. Such a lovely writer...why restrict herself to a small subset of people and circumstances? But what they all seem to overlook is that she uses Bengalis in the way Faulkner uses residents of Yoknapatawpha County--the repetition of geography and particular ethnic themes building a very specific sense of space. That's a big part of why her latest collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is her best work yet.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies and enjoyed The Namesake, and wasn't sure how Unaccustomed Earth would stack up. But as I read, I found myself feeling reluctant to put it down, even though I dreaded finishing the book. Rather than being a rehash of old stories (after all, why mess with a Pulitzer-winning formula?), every story built upon the base. Having already broached the themes of Indian emigration and arranged marriages in the earlier books, Lahiri's free now to reflect on the deeper mechanics of relationships.

In a way, Lahiri moves her previous characters into a post-immigration era. Her new set of characters is almost all second-generation Indian-Americans, with parents who've long since assimilated into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc. One of the most common threads of the book is the transference of anxiety from the parents to the children, who worry not about fitting in with Americans, but with their parents. White spouses, American food, and zero interest in Calcutta-based customs--those are the rebellions. But the rejections of heritage, no matter how small, cause the various protagonists to second-guess their lives, their lovers, and their own legacies. Nearly all of the relationships in the book are marked by this anxiety, tinged with a deeper melancholy than Lahiri's other stuff.

Perhaps the biggest difference in this book --and the most evidence of a maturing perspective--is the examination of marriage. Maybe it's because Lahiri is now married herself and has kids, but she seems especially interested in the ongoing conversation and evolution between two people who've committed to one another. One story features a couple attending the wedding of the husband's old friend/infatuation. Lahiri doesn't take the expected route, the "he still has feelings for the ex" one. Instead, she looks at the protagonist's complex feelings about his wife in general. There's no artificial choice between the old love and the current one.

The book's centerpiece is a trio of stories about Hema and Kaushik, whose lives cross several times. The first story is Hema recalling how Kaushik and his family, friends of her parents, came to stay with them for a month when the kids were teenagers. Hema uses the second person, clearly talking to Kaushik, saying the kind of intimate things you can't tell someone when he's sitting on the couch a foot away from you. The next story is Kashiuk's, and although Hema isn't actually present at all, it's his turn to use the private "you." Their final story, third person, details the most significant intersection of their lives. He's an itinerant photojournalist, and she's a professor about to give in and marry an arranged husband. This was by far my favorite story in the book. "Going Ashore" is such a perfect meeting of plot development, realism, and lush language that it has an extra sparkle. The last few paragraphs actually made me tear up because they were so unexpected--definitely not a common occurrence for me ever, but especially not when reading.

I'm not sure any contemporary writer conveys the love/loss duality like Jhumpa Lahiri does. And if she wants to keep doing it with Bengali characters who live in Boston, fine by me. I'll line up every time and hand over my money.

So much of the writing is beautiful, but there were some standouts:

"These women, with their rich, loose tangles of hair, their sunglasses concealing no wrinkles, were younger than Hema, but she felt inexperienced in their company, innocent of the responsibilities of rearing children and running a household. She had grown used to this feeling over the years with Julian--her position as the other woman, which had felt so sophisticated when their affair began, was actually a holding pen that kept her from growing up. She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing a life with the person she loved."

"And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with...that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?"

"Kaushik never fully trusted the places he'd lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life."