Like the news, cookbooks often put me in a sour mood. After confronting one too many recipes in a row that call for carrot peeling, garlic mincing, or artichoke turning, I start to grumble: Why aren’t there more cookbooks written for people like me?
As even casual readers of my work probably understand, the reason is probably that there aren’t many people like me—eager home cooks who are flush with ambition, hampered by the usual time constraints, and in possession of only one fully operational arm. My lopsided brethren and I—the congenitally malformed, veterans of war, gangrene survivors, pirates, et al—constitute something of a niche readership whose numbers fall somewhere in between those of avid at-home canard à la presse practitioners and amateur miso makers. You might be surprised, then, to learn of a small and not-growing genre of cookbooks that ostensibly appeal to those lacking in limb.
Two years ago, faced with the rising cost of living in the greater Boston area, my family decided to put our lots in together and buy a property that could accommodate my middle sister, Kerri; my mother; and my oldest sister, Kirsten, her husband and their two children. I live in New York, but I was a part of this too, if only because of that fantasy of every kid who has grown up poor — that I would know I was successful when I could buy my mother a house.
I couldn’t, alone, afford to buy a house for her. We all bought this house together. If you live close to any major city in the United States and are not part of a family with the wealth and means to secure stable housing, chances are you’ve experienced this kind of displacement in the past decade — the kind that means that the place you know as your home does not belong to you. I have a friend from rural Tennessee who has seen even his family graveyard swept up by developers hoping to “revitalize” the holler.
So when I tell you that Rosewater is a science fiction mystery that is simultaneously about an alien invasion and a man trying to avoid being murdered, I do so knowing that each of those elements may conjure familiar generic conventions. If you add them up, you’ll have a relatively good sense of what reading Thompson’s first novel in the Wormwood Trilogy is like. But at a certain point in the book, you may find yourself dramatically reassessing those assumptions while spinning backward and cringing with horror-tinged delight. I urge you to throw your hands up and enjoy the ride.
It took me until the end of the book to realize this wasn't a fantasy novel, but a work of historical fiction telling the origin story of Madame Tussaud. It took me that long because the book's affect, its style, its concerns, its sadness and loneliness and empathy, were so thoroughly those of Carey's fantasy series that I was left thinking helplessly about how inadequate are our conversations about genre.
One of the pleasures of historical fiction is the way it allows us to re-examine the events of our own time from a longer perspective, though writers and readers must always be aware of regarding the past through the lens of our own values. Historical crime has to walk an especially fine line in this regard, since crime fiction is concerned with matters of justice, law and social order, concepts that have changed significantly over the centuries. CJ Sansom’s terrific Shardlake series, which has so far spanned more than a decade of turbulent Tudor history, has always achieved this balance with great skill, principally through the character of Matthew Shardlake, the hunchbacked lawyer detective who finds himself reluctantly embroiled in political intrigue and murder.