22 July 2021

Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker

 I am convinced that this book — especially towards the beginning — was shaped by an editor, or person at the press, or someone, who gave Bosker some bad advice about what she needed to do to make the book better, by counseling her to play up the eccentricities of the culture she was describing, and make herself more "relatable." I am willing to believe that this was some outsider's input, because about a third of the way through, that annoying fembot routine (mercifully) falls away and the book becomes far more interesting, and better written. 

And I'll even add that, in the defense of the bad advice giver, this book faces significant challenges in identifying its audience, and speaking to their interests. Because basically, it's a book about how Bosker learned to love wine, or rather, it's a book about why wine is interesting, which means there are lengthy sections that detail various things about wine that a lay-person...will probably not find interesting. The ostensible plan is to convince the average reader that they *should* find it interesting, but the fact of the matter is, it's really hard to do that through words alone. You can talk about your own experience, you can talk about the various properties of wine, but I suspect that none of that will really persuade someone who isn't already at least somewhat on board, and frankly, they probably have to be a bit of a nerd, too. But for such a reader, the first chunk of the book, when Bosker is trying to do that persuasive work to spark the initial curiosity, is likely to be tedious, if not downright annoying. I found it so obnoxious that I almost stopped reading. 

The other tough pill to swallow is watching Bosker repeatedly talk her way into incredible opportunities that she is completely unqualified for. How nice for her! If you are a person who works, or has worked, in the restaurant industry, this will drive you absolutely up the wall. Watching her use connections to get into events that other people would kill for, or get hired and make awful mistakes that not only cost lots of money, but also screw over her co-workers, is so, so infuriating, and the blithe way the she skates past it all doesn't help. This is not really a book about the restaurant industry — yes, at the end, she is working in a wine bar, but she still always seems like an outsider, and like someone who is only there passing time until she can do the thing she really wants to do (which, of course, is true of plenty of other people in the industry as well). She also remains deeply skeptical of a lot of the pomp and pretension in fine dining, fair enough! But the result is that she implicitly casts people who make a career out of it as mostly insane.

Despite all that, I did come around on the book in the later portion, largely because what she says about wine really is quite interesting, and you can tell that she genuinely gets into it. Some internet sleuthing tells me that she did, however, quit her wine job, and it seems that she's devoting herself to being a full-time writer. I wouldn't mind reading another book of hers, but I hope that whatever she pursues next, she isn't just inserting herself into a new subculture and being a privileged, incompetent asshole while wringing whatever good material she can out of it.


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