Stanley Park

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read for a while
Review: I liked Taylor's style of building suspense by making you wonder what he is talking about...you have to read another few pages to find out, and by that time another element of the story has crept in. I worked at a restaurant in Paris, and bought pots and knives through a chef I knew there. I now live in the Vancouver area, so it was great fun to read names of places and things that are familiar. I also am old enough to remember the little children being found in the park. All these subplots, all connected to his "cultiver ton jardin" theme, made this culinary delight a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying read.

Rating:
Summary: Not Your Typical Gourmet Mystery Cannery-Row Romance
Review: This is an odd book, at once intriguing and annoying. I'll
focus on texture and style, rather than plot, which other
reviewers have adequately misdescribed. The major character and
primary theme is cooking as profession and art. This thread is
developed with extraordinary realism and, probably, accuracy, to
the point where I became rather bored with it -- gourmet dining
is not my thing, much less the exacting procedures which lie
behind it. However, someone who is interested in it will
probably be entranced.

Concurrent with this thread is another, that of the major
character's father, who is a sociologist who, as research
toward his next book, goes to live in Stanley Park with the
homeless. The homeless are shamelessly romanticized,
Thomas-Hart-Benton, Cannery-Row folk style; one can hardly
open his toothless mouth without uttering eternal truths
cast in Symbolist poetry, and they all live happily in the
underbrush by trapping sparrows and raccoons. Maybe it is
my warped personality, but having been among and of the poor
much more than I would have chosen, I find that sort of
fantasizing about them very annoying.

Yet another strand involves a businessman who appears
to represent global capitalism; in this strand, the major and
other characters are not represented either realistically or
romantically, but rather in the flashy, baroque, post-post
style of with-it magazines and web sites. And yet further
back there's a strand of honest yet exalted Burgundian
cookery, love, and hiking in a '30s-novel sort of France.

When these varous strands impinge on one another, either
as a natural development of their own internal logic or
because the author feels it's time to screw them together
and give the book some semblance of coherence, the effect
is sometimes patently artifical and labored, sometimes
very clever, sometimes both at once, as when the hero chef, at
the novel's climax, causes dozens of very expensive guests of
the global capitalist (now his boss) to ingest raccoon obtained
from his father's homeless friends. Despite the grinding of
the works, some humorous moments are obtained, as when the hero
explains to a superhip reporter lady that his restaurant is
"beyond international. Beyond globalized. ... We belong to
no cuisine, to no people, to no culinary morality. We belong
only to those who can can reach us and understand us and afford
us. Gerriamo's is post-national.... Post-national Groove
Food." It's too bad these moments aren't a bit more frequent
and a bit more savage. Our world cries out for another Georg
Grosz.

As with some other authors, the characterizations of the lesser
actors are more vivid and memorable than those of the more
important ones. The hero in particular seems to lack particular
form. This isn't necessarily a defect; since most of the novel
takes place from his point of view, a certain ambiguity and
amorphousness may enable readers to imagine themselves into
his person more easily than if he were of a crustier sort.
(I don't mean to say he is passive -- he has many odd ideas
and is willing to act vigorously in pursuit of them. But
beyond cookery, there is no particular coherence or color
to them.)

Narratively, the story moves forward by fits and starts. Since
much of it is attuned to the hero's business success or lack of
it in the world of Vacouver restaurants, it has a certain
amount of formal movement which will probably be adequate for
those who demand a certain level of narrativity, that is, "a
good story". They may be annoyed at the other threads, which
don't go anywhere very much except as they're dragged along
by the main action.

I guess in sum I'd have to say that I didn't like this
book very much. Perhaps its postmodern incoherence was too
much for it to carry. But I do hope the author will persist,
and I'll probably pick up his next effort with hope and
interest. I'll be clever here at the end and say next time
he might let the ingredients cook together longer and
figure each other out.

Rating:
Summary: Haute cuisine at the final frontier
Review: This novel features Jeremy Papier, a chef struggling with major financial problems, his father, "the Professor," an anthropologist writing about the schizophrenic of Vancouver's Stanley Park and showing signs of becoming one himself, and Dante Beale, a British Columbian counterpart to Howard Schultz who owns an espresso coffee chain tellingly called "Inferno." Dante, a former neighbor of Professor Papier and his son, admires Jeremy's skill tremendously and would like to open a restaurant with him. But he can't resist his own unbounded faith in his corporate resesearch, to the point of telling Jeremy what color food to cook, or his tendency to micromanage. Several other characters, most closely involved with Jeremy, and the Professor's research on the death of two children decades before complete the story nicely. More than the sum of its parts, like any fine meal.