Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe

 This is not a book about America's opioid epidemic. I think it's important to make that clear: the opioid epidemic is a complex phenomenon, with a lot of moving parts, and the mainstream media hasn't done an especially great job helping the public understand it. This book isn't fixing that. In some ways, it probably contributes to some of the more damaging misrepresentations of the issue.* The real focus of this book is the Sackler family, and, basically, what craven, awful people they are. Truly. You get the sense that Keefe really tried to be neutral, but gradually became so appalled by Sacklers that he just couldn't be, anymore.  Simply detailing the facts already paints a pretty devastating portrait, but actually expressing to readers what some of the implications of these facts, it becomes impossible not to sound like you're attacking them. The effect is exacerbated if you listen to the audiobook, read by the author — there's no way he could have kept it out of his voice.

I read the book mainly because I loved Keefe's previous book, Say Nothing, so much (if you haven't read it, get yourself a copy asap; it's phenomenal). And it must be admitted that this one really isn't as good. It's somewhat sloppy, with lots of minor repetitions (where he tells you something damning, with a kind of DUN-DUN-DUN air, and then awhile later, tells you the same thing again). The timeline is mostly straightforwardly chronological, but once you get into the third generation, it gets a little fuzzier, and it also gets much harder to keep the various people straight (especially because the family recycles first names). And the unwavering focus on greed and ambition — while laudable in some ways! — leaves little room for a more detailed character exploration. In particular, I wanted to know more about the family's interests in fine art. Keefe somewhat suggests that it's motivated by a desire for prestige and respect, but I wanted to know more. Of course, the material for such a profile might not have been readily available. Still, at times, I wanted less of a chronicle of what they were doing, and more insight into who these people were, or are. But honestly, despite these flaws, the material is so juicy and salacious that the book is a gripping read anyhow. 

The thing I ultimately found most fascinating was the role that artists, and performance art-style protests, had in the family's decline. Nan Goldin becomes a minor hero by the end of the book, and seems to have been the most formidable force in ending the cozy relationship the Sacklers had with many museums. This is a super interesting insight into the complex relationship between art itself and the high-powered, extremely wealthy, art world. You *can* buy some measure of success and acceptance in the art world! But only up to a point. It turns out that museums care more about their reputation than their donors. 

Ultimately, this is really a kind of pleasurable hate-read. You gain some insight into the crisis, sure — and you definitely get some insight into politics and the power of corporations (horrifying) — but mostly, this is about channeling your vitriolic hatred in a worthy direction.

 

 

* A lot of the narrative about the epidemic has been about the individual people struggling because of their drug use, or about the potency of the drugs they're taking, or maybe about the evils of Purdue pharma, and very little of it has been about the way our society treats drug users, and how criminalization of drugs invariably leads to a lot more injury and death. Keefe acknowledges this, a little, at the end of the book, where he not only says that the book doesn't get into the intricacies of the epidemic, but also notes that he does not weigh in on controversies over how chronic pain should be managed. He makes two points which are both important and valid — first, that there is a genuine stigma attached to long-term opioid use, and that it means that people who struggle with chronic pain also struggle to receive proper care. Second, the Sackler clan has callously exploited this fact to sell more oxycontin and make more money, and we shouldn't give them a pass on that. The book very clearly demonstrates the latter, but only glancingly mentions the former. It would be easy to walk away from it with a sense that the major problem is the potency of the drugs, and increased access to them.

Ticket to Childhood, Nguyen Nhat Anh

 Picked this up randomly on a recent visit to the Seminary Co-op, and I've been feeling pretty blah and unfocused lately, so I treated myself to a morning of reading in bed. The joy of short novels!

This is a charming and winsome little book — a quick read whose sly humor and meta-fictional play keeps it from being an overly saccharine meditation on the nature of childhood. It's a light and playful read, one that could easily seem grating if you weren't in the right mood, but is perfectly pleasant if you are. You can easily see why it was a massive best-seller — it's just the right amount of good cheer and casual philosophy.

Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enriquez

 I was feeling sort of so-so about this collection of short stories — nothing wrong with it, just not really blowing me away — and then it was a hot hot Chicago day, and I was at my partner's mother's apartment, and she has no air conditioning, and I felt absolutely swollen with heat, so (taking advantage of my child being distracted by his grandmother) I ran myself an ice cold bath, and grabbed this book. The specific story I started reading is one about halfway through, called Adela's House, and it is terrifying. Reading it in a silent bathroom, slipping slowly into the icy water, was absolutely incredible — literally chilling. And that fantastic experience totally changed my relationship to the book: I tore through the rest over the next few days.

These are fascinating stories, to me, because they are so hard to place, generically. You want to call them gothic, but they're more like actual horror — at times, almost unbearably so — and yet, they're also deeply interested in the inner lives and feelings of the characters. The terror stems both from deeply weird and creepy things happening in the world, and from subterranean traumas in the characters' own psyches. And so the plots balance between the two, emphasizing the impossibility of any real resolution. 

It's a intensely unsettling collection, and I'm honestly not sure how I felt about it, but it's definitely unlike anything else I've read.

Provence, 1970, by Luke Barr

It seemed appropriate to follow the Bourdain with another food book, this one focused on one of my great loves, MFK Fisher. I listened to the audiobook, and maybe zoned out a little here and there, unfortunately, but nonetheless absolutely relished this book. Written by Fisher's grand-nephew, it focuses mostly on her, and a pivotal moment in 1970, where she felt the world, and her life, changing, as the food scene evolved, and France no longer seemed as idyllic as it had formerly. It's a wonderful portrayal of an older woman who is reflecting on her successes, and relationships, and loves, and pondering what she wants. And for Fisher fans, it's just a pleasure to be in her orbit, so to speak. The pleasure was heightened, because over the weekend I got to have dinner at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, and they still have one of my favorite dishes on the menu, the boquerones, and having those with a small glass of sherry just feels like the perfect way to pay tribute to the woman.

But in addition to all the great MFK Fisher content, there's also plenty of wonderfully gossipy stuff about the (sometimes catty) social scene of all the major food writers — the Childs, James Beard, Elizabeth David, Richard Olney. And some interesting reflections on the changing American food scene, from the loving embrace of French cooking, and local produce, and the later rise of appreciation for various ethnic foods. There's a particular interest in the links to snobbery and pretension, and some occasional gestures towards our foodie present, and the culture of celebrity chefs and cooking shows. I didn't track this as much, regrettably, because my attention is rather divided these days, but there's some good stuff there.

Overall though, it's just an excellent summer read. The prose is lovely, and there are plenty of great descriptions of incredible meals. A very enjoyable book.

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

 Seeing this wonderful trailer for the new documentary about Bourdain inspired me to finally pick up Kitchen Confidential, which I'd somehow never read. I was fond of Bourdain: though I only watched his various shows occasionally, my partner would generally watch the episode of Parts Unknown that covered whatever place we were traveling to to get recommendations (and then sometimes we'd re-watch the episode after coming back, as a way to revisit our trip), and so perhaps part of my love for the man is because all of his recommendations were fantastic, so I am indebted to him for some really wonderful experiences. We also have some of his cookbooks, and have made some great meals out of them. I like his style, which is a kind of no-bullshit attitude that is leavened with a deep solidarity with people experiencing any form of oppression. And so it was interesting to finally read the book that made him famous — or rather, to listen to it, read by the man himself, in his wonderfully distinctive voice. 

You can see why Kitchen Confidential rocked the foodie world when it came out. I've read a handful of restaurant memoirs, and this one is still by far the most explicit in revealing some of the less appealing sides of the business. And not just the gross stuff, like days-old fish being served up as specials, but also the exploitative labor practices, and more significantly, the hard realities of what they drive people to do. Bourdain is open about the toxicity of the culture in kitchens, and he doesn't exempt himself in his descriptions of it. Actually, one of the most interesting moments is towards the end, when he describes the kitchen of a chef whom he admires, and marvels at how it essentially contradicts almost everything he's said about what restaurants are like. Maybe, he realizes, the chaotic conditions in places he's worked is due in part to...himself, and the way he operates. Maybe he's part of the problem.

It's hard not to read this book through the lens of knowledge about the tragic end of Bourdain's life, and I think it's unavoidable that the many passages about depression, rage, and a sense of futility resonate differently in light of it. From this angle, one could say that this is a book that traces the trajectory of a single man's growth and development, from a bratty privileged asshole to a far more self-aware, and openly flawed, man with a deep appreciation, not just of food, but also of what it takes to make it, and perhaps a renewed sense of moral obligation. Something that is especially wonderful is that this development is very clearly a work in progress, and one where you can see some of the seeds of what came later — one of the final chapters of the book describes a trip to Japan, and it's really fascinating to see Bourdain not only thrill to the experience of a cuisine that's entirely new to him, and recapture an excitement that had seemed somewhat lost, but also to watch as he learns how to travel. It's kind of amazing to see him be so bad at it at first — having to hype himself up to go into a noodle bar and order rather than eating his first Japanese meal at Starbucks, for instance. 

Though the central narrative here is really about Bourdain himself, first, and about restaurant culture and labor, second, there's also a fair amount about food and cooking that's kind of fun and interesting to. It's because of this book, for instance, that my partner disdains garlic presses (and I will admit that in the full context of the entire book, I might be a little more convinced, though I will absolutely keep using it for the garlic that goes in salad dressings). My favorite part was the paean to shallots, which he says are just utterly underused in home cooking, and I fully agree.

Anyways. I don't think Bourdain was a saint (and he would no doubt think you were an idiot if you disagreed), and I don't think his various shows were without problems,* but I have a great appreciation for the man, and this book made it even stronger.

* Total tangent, but something that really annoyed me was that his Istanbul episode was filmed during Ramadan. Wtf? That's just dumb timing, and a poor representation of the city. But on the other hand, maybe it actually did some valuable work in demystifying and unpacking some stereotypes. I dunno. This is part of what makes me a bit leery of Parts Unknown, and I kind of think that it was something that Bourdain struggled with as well — wanting to share an appreciation for travel and different parts of the world, but also being aware of the ethical problems involved, and so much of the awfulness of tourism. You sensed that he felt responsible, and in a complex way, even as he also wanted to refuse that responsibility and pretend it was just about enjoying the food. Or so it seemed to me. In the grand scheme of things, I think it was actually more honest and open about the politics of it all than a lot of other foodie shows are these days. But I haven't really watched enough to make a strong claim in that regard.

How Much of These Hills is Gold? by C Pam Zhang

I had such mixed feelings about this book! I freely acknowledge that probably, part of the problem was that I was drawn to it because I loved Téa Obreht's Inland so much, and I kept wanting it to be more like that, which is ridiculous and unfair. 

That said, this is a challenging book, and a very uneven one. It's absolutely absorbing, and wonderfully vivid, at times, but it also has big chunks that feel utterly contrived. As I was reading, I found myself thinking, "This is made up. This is all just made up." Which, of course, is all fiction, so what was it that was bugging me here? Was it the plot twists? Was it the writing style? Was it that it seemed like the author was trying to say something profound about gender, cultural identity, etc, but it was actually kind of incoherent? Or — to be charitable to the author — was it that the text was subverting my expectations of what The Olde West is "supposed" to be like, when as I recognize that those expectations are largely invented fictions?

Similarly, was the odd pacing — where crucial details that utterly changed your sense of the entire story were casually tossed out at random, and entire years jumped by in a few paragraphs that were so crammed with plot points that they could be spun out into their own novel — a brilliant innovation that was challenging storytelling conventions, or just... clumsy plotting?

Certainly, there are parts of this story that feel incredibly cliché, and not in an intentional way. But it also does have some wonderfully nuanced explorations of the fluidity of identity. 

I don't know. I think Zhang has a ton of potential, but this book...feels like a MFA thesis.

Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg

 I have this weird problem, which is that when a book aligns extremely closely with my particular intellectual interests or loves, it makes me uncomfortable. I am far too accustomed to being an outsider, I guess, even within particular communities that I am a part of. So this novel, which is first and foremost an engagement with the 18th century, its history and fiction, and the scholarship written about it, from a perspective that is strongly oriented to studies of sex and gender, queerness, and race, was just so firmly in my wheelhouse that I kept metaphorically looking over my shoulder as I read it, like, this is a joke right? It was super interesting to me to read this with my bookclub, none of whom are 18C lit people (but one of whom is a historian), and to hear about how it came across to them. Academics are so accustomed to thinking that nobody else finds their area interesting that it's kind of revelatory to realize that other people might also be into it.

On the other hand, I also kind of hate the whole trope of scholars working on a discovered manuscript cast as thrilling adventure. This is very much a me problem, not a problem with this book. Actually, Rosenberg's version is almost a parody of this mode, told through footnotes, with a genuinely hilarious satire of the corporate university occasionally interjecting in chirpy all-caps. But I nonetheless found myself somewhat impatient with the repeated mentions of a coded meaning available for those with eyes to see. And frustrated by the half story told in the footnotes about the narrator and his various relationships — I wanted to hear more, which is of course a nice reversal of the historical novel idea, and I also wanted him to get his shit together, which is maybe in part a send-up of the whole tormented genius male academic thing, I dunno. The post-modern footnote aspect is definitely part of the book's charm, and I truly loved seeing scholarship that I care a lot about being cited, but maybe it was just a touch too conspiratorial for me.

But the body of the novel, ostensibly Jack's memoirs, is absolutely gorgeous. So beautifully written, such lush and vivid detail. It was lyrical and warm and sexy and just wonderful. A story you could completely sink into.

Overall, I really can't wait to see what Jordy Rosenberg writes next.