Culture
Book Review: ‘Care and Feeding,’ by Laurie Woolever; ‘Cellar Rat,’ by Hannah Selinger
The chief executive of the BLT restaurant group is “Jewish and kept kosher and he loved to show up at the restaurant with a wad of bills so thick it actually hurt to watch him.” The food guide pioneer Tim Zagat is, without explanation, “rotund, grotesque.” It’s the early aughts and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is repulsive, the farm-to-table movement a sham, and Colleen, a manager at Bar Americain with “straight and oily” hair who fires Selinger for texting during work, “the kind of restaurant lifer who hated people like me — newbies, people who fit in seamlessly for no good reason.”
“Cellar Rat” feels at times like a charmless mix of Joris-Karl Huysmans, M.F.K. Fisher and Regina George. A blurb describes the book as “brutally honest,” but there’s a thin line between brutal honesty and glib brutality. These are lessons I wish Selinger could have had a chance to pick up from Tony Bourdain, and ones Woolever certainly did.
Selinger’s foundational trauma is a problematic sexual encounter with the pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. She renders the episode in explicit, outraged detail but also with a frustrating veil of vagueness.
The difficulty for the reader, however sympathetic, is that the incident doesn’t occur until halfway through the book, by which point our outrage meter has been somewhat decalibrated by so much relentless flippancy — and if this is what cemented or changed her attitudes, that’s not clear, either.
To make matters more confusing, each chapter ends on a recipe. For instance, “Chapter 5: Fourplay,” which contains the Iuzzini episode, finishes with a recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Cream Pie. It’s not quite as bad as Batali’s mea culpa with accompanying recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls, but it’s equally baffling.
Unbelievably, Selinger ends her book by dedicating it to the people of Gaza. “This book is yours too,” she writes. But, quite frankly, I doubt they would want it.
CARE AND FEEDING: A Memoir | By Laurie Woolever | Ecco | 342 pp. | $28.99
CELLAR RAT: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly | By Hannah Selinger | Little, Brown | 294 pp. | $29
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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