Read Online I Can't Complain by Elinor Lipman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elinor Lipman
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circa 1964, and the Catskills (then or now). It was almost too easy: chicken croquettes, meatloaf surprise, turkey potpie, lettuce wedge, and baked stuffed sole, versus flanken, capon, blueberry blintzes, canned figs, and almond bark. Just as my narrator finds personal happiness in the enemy camp—in a matrimonial surf ’n’ turf—so do Jewish and gentile cuisines coexist peacefully on her table: a smokehouse ham and Grand Marnier sweet potato soufflé one night, brisket and noodle kugel the next.
The first time I employed food as a narrative helpmate, I was writing my first novel,
Then She Found Me.
I needed a potluck contribution with airs, i.e., not a match with the other guests’ four-grain bread and spiral-cut ham, and perhaps not to anyone else’s liking. It was 1988, so I chose calamari vinaigrette—ambitious, daunting, and, I hoped, faintly ridiculous.
This reliance on talking food may be rooted in a pivotal social/gastronomic experience in my own life: At nineteen, I was brought to a young man’s parents’ home for dinner, at which his mother served calf’s liver without apology. With so much serenity, in fact, that there was an otherworldliness to her composure. Did I need a degree in psychology to know my boyfriend’s mother was (a) clueless; (b) opposed to her baby going steady; (c) passive-aggressive; (d) a few capers short of a canapé; (e) all of the above? [Reader: if you were writing this scene and wanted to intensify the culinary hostility, would you add to the plate (a) a baked potato; (b) white rice; (c) corn niblets; (d) beets and lima beans?]
Characters have to eat, don’t they? Mine simply do it while you’re watching. They make reservations, study menus, talk and cook, talk and eat, refill their wineglasses, linger over decaf. I’m at peace with this predilection because I find that every interaction with the stove, refrigerator, plate, and fork provides an opportunity to mine the telling detail, to make abstract notions concrete in a way I hope is a kind of shorthand.
Metaphors? Sort of. Blood, bones, lamb, variety meats (brains, guts, hearts) are entrées with symbolic heft. But I’ve found pleasure in telegraphing smaller coded messages: you know this person; you’ve dined with her or cooked for him. Happily, the supplies in this literary tool chest are limitless, and readers own the same ones. Tenderloin or tofu? Coffee or chamomile? Iceberg or arugula? If Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had been a novelist as well as a gastronome, he might have written, “Tell me what your characters eat, and I’ll tell you how their story ends.”
Assignment: What Happens Next?
February 2004
T HE
BOSTON GLOBE
’S ART EDITOR , whom I didn’t know personally, phoned me to ask if I watched
Sex and the City.
I answered carefully—was this a survey? a culture IQ test?—“Why, yes, I do.”
“We thought you might,” he said, naming a wise-guy columnist who liked to tease me in print.
This editor was calling with an assignment: In six days the long-running show’s much hoo-ha’d finale was airing. Would I write a piece in which I guessed how it would end?
I asked how long and for when.
“A thousand words? Twelve hundred? By Friday. But can you get me a draft earlier, like Wednesday, so we can get the artwork going?” Have I mentioned this was Monday? I said yes, okay, I thought I could do that.
It ran big and splashy the morning of the finale, just like this, without getting much right in the way of denouement predictions.
Last Sunday night, with my cable box tuned to HBO, I inhaled sharply and emitted a small sob of relief when Miranda the pragmatist leaned toward the repentant Mr. Big and said, “Go get our girl.”
I hoped and believed that Carrie Bradshaw, lead best friend, would in this our final night together be granting my fondest TV wish: Forgive Big his inconstancy. Say yes. Come home.
Retro happy ending? Of course. But who are we anyway but fans of a fairy tale set in a
The first time I employed food as a narrative helpmate, I was writing my first novel,
Then She Found Me.
I needed a potluck contribution with airs, i.e., not a match with the other guests’ four-grain bread and spiral-cut ham, and perhaps not to anyone else’s liking. It was 1988, so I chose calamari vinaigrette—ambitious, daunting, and, I hoped, faintly ridiculous.
This reliance on talking food may be rooted in a pivotal social/gastronomic experience in my own life: At nineteen, I was brought to a young man’s parents’ home for dinner, at which his mother served calf’s liver without apology. With so much serenity, in fact, that there was an otherworldliness to her composure. Did I need a degree in psychology to know my boyfriend’s mother was (a) clueless; (b) opposed to her baby going steady; (c) passive-aggressive; (d) a few capers short of a canapé; (e) all of the above? [Reader: if you were writing this scene and wanted to intensify the culinary hostility, would you add to the plate (a) a baked potato; (b) white rice; (c) corn niblets; (d) beets and lima beans?]
Characters have to eat, don’t they? Mine simply do it while you’re watching. They make reservations, study menus, talk and cook, talk and eat, refill their wineglasses, linger over decaf. I’m at peace with this predilection because I find that every interaction with the stove, refrigerator, plate, and fork provides an opportunity to mine the telling detail, to make abstract notions concrete in a way I hope is a kind of shorthand.
Metaphors? Sort of. Blood, bones, lamb, variety meats (brains, guts, hearts) are entrées with symbolic heft. But I’ve found pleasure in telegraphing smaller coded messages: you know this person; you’ve dined with her or cooked for him. Happily, the supplies in this literary tool chest are limitless, and readers own the same ones. Tenderloin or tofu? Coffee or chamomile? Iceberg or arugula? If Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had been a novelist as well as a gastronome, he might have written, “Tell me what your characters eat, and I’ll tell you how their story ends.”
Assignment: What Happens Next?
February 2004
T HE
BOSTON GLOBE
’S ART EDITOR , whom I didn’t know personally, phoned me to ask if I watched
Sex and the City.
I answered carefully—was this a survey? a culture IQ test?—“Why, yes, I do.”
“We thought you might,” he said, naming a wise-guy columnist who liked to tease me in print.
This editor was calling with an assignment: In six days the long-running show’s much hoo-ha’d finale was airing. Would I write a piece in which I guessed how it would end?
I asked how long and for when.
“A thousand words? Twelve hundred? By Friday. But can you get me a draft earlier, like Wednesday, so we can get the artwork going?” Have I mentioned this was Monday? I said yes, okay, I thought I could do that.
It ran big and splashy the morning of the finale, just like this, without getting much right in the way of denouement predictions.
Last Sunday night, with my cable box tuned to HBO, I inhaled sharply and emitted a small sob of relief when Miranda the pragmatist leaned toward the repentant Mr. Big and said, “Go get our girl.”
I hoped and believed that Carrie Bradshaw, lead best friend, would in this our final night together be granting my fondest TV wish: Forgive Big his inconstancy. Say yes. Come home.
Retro happy ending? Of course. But who are we anyway but fans of a fairy tale set in a
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