Lionel Shriver is one of my favorite writers. Smart, provocative, unsettling. what better adjectives could you ask for than that? I'm thrilled to have an excerpt of her new novel here. And if you missed it, here is a repost of my interview with you.
Chapter
One
I have to wonder whether
any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. I
don’t mean celebratory dinners, good fellowship; I mean salivation,
mastication, and peristalsis. Oddly, for something I do every day, I can’t remember
many meals in detail, while it is far easier for me to call up favorite movies,
faithful friendships, graduations. It follows, then, that film, affinity, and education
are more important to me than stuffing my face. Well done, me, you say. But
were I honestly to total the time I have lavished on menu planning, grocery shopping,
prep and cooking, table setting, and kitchen cleanup for meal upon meal, food,
one way or another, has dwarfed my fondness for Places in the Heart to
an incidental footnote; ditto my fondness for any human being, even those whom
I profess to love. I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking
about lunch. Throw in the time I have also spent ruing indulgence in lemon
meringue pies, vowing to skip breakfast tomorrow, and opening the
refrigerator/stopping myself from dispatching the leftover pumpkin custard/then
shutting it firmly again, and I seem to have concerned myself with little else
but food.
So why, if, by
inference, eating has been so embarrassingly central for me, can I not remember
an eidetic sequence of stellar meals?
Like most people, I
recall childhood favorites most vividly, and like most kids I liked plain
things: toast, baking-powder biscuits, saltines. My palate broadened in
adulthood, but my character did not. I am white rice. I have always existed to
set off more exciting fare. I was a foil as a girl. I am a foil now.
I doubt this mitigates
my discomfiture much, but I have some small excuse for having overemphasized
the mechanical matter of sustenance. For eleven years, I ran a catering
business. You would think, then, that I could at least recall individual
victories at Breadbasket, Inc. Well, not exactly. Aside from academics at the university,
who are more adventurous, Iowans are conservative eaters, and I can certainly
summon a monotonous assembly line of carrot cake, lasagna, and sour-cream cornbread.
But the only dishes that I recollect in high relief are the disasters—the Indian
rosewater pudding thickened with rice flour that turned into a stringy, viscous
vat suitable for affixing wallpaper. The rest—the salmon steaks rolled around somethingorother,
the stir-fries of thisandthat with an accent of whathaveyou—it’s all a blur.
Patience; I am rounding
on something. I propose: food is by nature elusive. More concept than
substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than
satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or
political zealotry. Not irresistible tastiness but the very failure of food to
reward is what drives us to eat more of it. The most sumptuous experience of ingestion
is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
The actual eating part almost doesn’t happen. This near-total inability to
deliver is what makes the pleasures of the table so tantalizing, and also so
dangerous.
Petty? I’m not so sure.
We are animals; far more than the ancillary matter of sex, the drive to eat
motivates nearly all of human endeavor. Having conspicuously triumphed in the competition
for resources, the fleshiest among us are therefore towering biological success
stories. But ask any herd of overpopulating deer: nature punishes success. Our
instinctive saving for a rainy day, our burying of acorns in the safest and
most private of hiding places for the long winter, however prudent in its way,
however expressive of Darwinian guile, is killing my country. That is why I
cast doubt on whether the pantry, as a subject, is paltry. True, I sometimes
wonder just how much I care about my country. But I care about my brother.
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