Something about foodie memoirs makes me devour them almost as fast as I can devour a sheet cake or box of Little Debbies. Julia Child’s My Life in France, any of Ruth Reichl’s books, and now Jacques Pepin. I know what you are thinking, how dare I mention these food luminaries in the same paragraph as sheet cake and Little Debbie. I am nothing if not a man of contradictions. I am quite a good home cook and home baker and I have a pretty sophisticated palate. But darn if I don’t like me some low cost sugar and shortening. And did I ever tell you about the time I ate brownies out of the garbage? It was years before Miranda did it on Sex in the City.

But back to M Pepin. Unlike Julia Child, I didn’t really know any of Pepin’s story until I read this memoir. I am not even sure when I first became aware of him and I really didn’t know how he came to prominence. Now I do, and his story surprises me more than a little. He started out his apprenticeship at the age of 13 after pleading with his parents to let him leave school so he follow his passion for food. Since his restauranteur mother got him into the kitchen in the first place, it didn’t take too much to convince his parents. It is these early years of Pepin’s story that I most liked. After proving himself in various capacities, making his way around the kitchens of Lyon and then Paris Pepin is less than excited when he is drafted into the French military while that country was at war in Algeria. Instead of heading off to the war zone, Pepin ends up as chef to the Prime Minister of France.

Throughout the memoir are many wonderful descriptions of food and wine that can make the reader hungry.

The most surprising (and least interesting to me) parts of Pepin’s career happened after he came to America. Perhaps most startling to me was that fact that Pepin worked for years in the test kitchens at Howard Johnsons working with another French chef to improve the quality of the restaurant chain’s food. Apparently HoJo’s back in the day isn’t what we may think of it today. Still he did many other things cookbooks, consulting, teaching, TV, etc. Still quite interesting, I just found it less interesting than his earlier years in France.

If you like food writing you will probably like this one. I know I am going to try at least one of the recipes included. But, if you haven’t already, read Childs’ My Life in France or Ruth Reichl’s books instead.

Photographer Alec Malone does not follow his long-term Senator-father into politics and turns down the “opportunity” to be a war photographer in Vietnam. Is this something he will live to regret?

Alec’s Swiss-Czech wife Lucia isn’t sure Washington is the place for her. She takes comfort and finds intellectual stimulation in the company of her Eastern European emigre neighbors and their frequent garden parties (literally exiles in the garden). Will this be enough for her?

Alec’s 90-something Senator-father is beginning his final decline. Will Alec get closure?

Lucia has never me her long-dead father. Will Lucia get closure?

Ward Just is the master of writing smart novels about the world of politics and the world around politics. His characters are often near the very heart of power, and just as often they are the types who like to fix things behind the scenes. Of his books set in Washington, they all evoke a time when members of Congress didn’t fly home every weekend and actually set down roots in Washington.  Many politicians today still do set done roots, but are forced into pretending like they have, often disparaging Washington so that the folks back home don’t think they are out of touch with local rage.*

But Exiles in the Garden is little to do with U.S. domestic politics and much more to do with the alienation and displacement, and international and intranational conflict and violence. But it is also about Alec’s quest for…hmm for what? There is something about this book that makes it difficulty for me to see the connection between Alec’s issues and the whole exile angle. Perhaps there is not meant to be that much of a connection. But then to me it just feels a bit episodic. I thoroughly enjoyed the episodes, Ward Just is a wonderful author**, but I didn’t quite get how it was all supposed to hang together.

For anyone interested in the world of old-school politics and its air of noble expedience and corruption you really can’t go wrong with Ward Just. I just wouldn’t start with this one.

*On a  little side note–although it is related– I need to rant for one second. Back in the 2008 presidential elections Sarah Palin often made comments about how she would bring more small town America to Washington. She often used comments like these to bait her base by taking a poke at the East Coast, politicians, and intellectuals. (Amazing how politicians like to act like they aren’t politicians.) My thought then, and my thought now, is that Congress has hundreds of members from small towns across America. In fact Congress is nothing if not dripping with small town baseball, mom, apple pie, etc. I think that part of the problem in Congress and Washington in general is that too much time, effort, and legislation goes into protecting, not small town values (hard work, honesty, etc.), but rather those less noble parochial concerns that may be good for a specific Congressional district but aren’t good for the country as a whole.

**A former journalist with the Washington Post, Just is usually pretty accurate with his details, but I ran into a few that made me wonder if he is slacking off a bit these days.  The first thing that made me wonder was that he wrote about tour buses at the Treasury building. This doesn’t ring true unless they did make stops there at one time or it was to drop folks off for the nearby White House. But you just don’t hear about or see tourists making a beeline for the Treasury. The Bureau of Engraving at the other end of 14th Street, maybe. But Treasury?  Still, I was able to over look this. There may be something I don’t know. But then he writes about a character’s radical parents who live on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota who “were forever plotting the overthrow of the government in Minneapolis…” You don’t have to be a Minnesotan to know that the seat of the state government is in St. Paul, not Minneapolis. And someone as poltically astute as Just should know that unless you are talking about municipal policy, Minneapolis is about business not politics. It seems like a small point, but such a basic mistake kind of makes one wonder what else he might be getting wrong. This is not something I expect from Just.

I wish I had this edition.

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor…[A]t least that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

It’s kind of funny that Muriel Spark, from the vantage point of 1963, regarded 1945 as “long ago”. I suppose it says a lot about how much the state of the nation changed from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the swinging sixties. This must have been especially true for the women who lived at the May of Teck Club. Would it even still have existed in 1963? From its rules of governance:

The May of Teck Club exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.

Many of the women who live at the club, while they may hold a job in London, are clearly biding their time (and playing the field) until they get married. Like a school or any other physically close community, the women self-segregate according to their inclinations and aspirations. At The May of Teck Club the segregation plays out floor by floor.

[On the third floor] there seemed to have congregated, by instinctive consent, most of the celibates, the old maids of settled character and various ages, those who had decided on a spinster’s life, and those who would one day do so but had not yet discerned the fact for themselves.

I find the last phrase particularly humorous. It’s kind of the same for young gays. Many of us sought out like-minded individuals without really knowing what we were seeking out or why.

I have a long standing penchant for the work of Muriel Spark, and the subject of this one is clearly something I appreciate, but when I first picked this up I read to about page 50 (of 141) before realizing that I hadn’t really taken any of it in. For some reason I was distracted and wasn’t really paying attention. When I picked it up some weeks later I was tempted to just continue on where I left off. Instead I went back and started from the beginning. All the main points of the narrative were familiar to me, but the amount of important, interesting, and funny detail that I had missed on the first go around was astonishing. One of the things that went completely over my head the first time was the frequency of the narrative shifts. There is nothing confusing about these shifts, I was just distracted.

As for the book itself. It is typical Spark. That is to say it is brilliant. Spark is the master of finding the subversive side and in many cases even the dark underbelly, of some of the most conventional characters and situations. I know there is a growing fan club of Spark fans out there. You really ought to add yourself to the ranks.
  

Regular readers will know that I rarely read and review current fiction. I have a strong contrarian streak that makes me shy away from anything getting too much attention. Yet with all of the online hoopla about Ann Patchett’s latest book I find myself in the “me too” crowd. Back in late 2000 my friend Earl handed me a copy of Bel Canto. Since Earl and I were music buddies, he rightly guessed that I would enjoy Patchett’s drama with a world-class soprano as protagonist. Once I finished Bel Canto, I went out and found all of Patchett’s other books and enjoyed them all to varying degrees.

There are two things that impress me about Patchett. The first is that I love her prose style. It is intelligent but very accessible. And it always feels right to me. Nothing seems forced. In contrast, I once listened to a radio interview with Patchett and found her to be pretentious in a way that her writing is not. (I still enjoyed the interview, but found her a little stagey–like she was playing the role of author. I think it may have been too many years hanging out with her friends from the Iowa Writing Workshop.)

The other thing that really impresses me about Patchett is her ability to write about worlds that she doesn’t inhabit. Although I love a book with a struggling writer, I am impressed by authors who steer clear of that formulation. And Patchett does it in spades. Her lastest creation is a group of drug researchers along the Amazon. There were moments in their travels up the river that made me think of Heart of Darkness, but I think that comparison doesn’t extend too deeply beyond the superficial similarity of a journey up a river into a jungle.

Having adequately sung the praises of Ms Patchett, I must say that State of Wonder didn’t feel as well thought out as her other novels. There were many provactive things that made me think (in a good, what does this say about humanity kind of way), but there were also moments that challenged me to maintain my suspension of disbelief. In no way do I think it a bad book, for me there were parts that didn’t hang together.

One paragraph of spoilers: Marina’s medical mistake was horrific, both physically and psychologically. How do doctors deal with their unavoidable mistakes? That is a head trip I am glad I don’t have to deal with. Didn’t it rip your heart out when Marina handed Easter over to the tribe? It shouldn’t have, he was misappropriated by Dr. Swenson in the first place, and naturally belonged among his tribe. And the genuine affection and the aspirations of both Anders and Marina for Easter were mired in first world paternalism as Dr. Swenson points out. But…yet…it just killed me when she handed him over. Not that he necessarily shunted off to his doom, but the incomprehension and loss that the deaf boy must have felt at that moment just killed me. And what does it say that Easter’s life is up for grabs as long as it saves Anders?

No more spoilers.

This would make a great book club book for reasons that are clear in my spoilers paragraph. So for those of you that haven’t read it, maybe it is time you did. Or if this one doesn’t sound like your thing, you really should go find some Patchett and read it.