Its first victim was my friend David. He was planning to retire and dedicate himself to writing. He told me that the flesh was weak and now that he was getting old, he’d gotten the itch to make himself immortal. Despite the clichés, I was relieved to learn that, in a circle as prosaic as ours, I wasn’t the only one with literary proclivities, so I pulled out the courage from where I’d stashed it away for years to show him my only manuscript that I judged to be more or less presentable. I won’t give any details about the story, but I will note that it was sad (it wanted to be), and the underlying theme had to do with how fragile and fleeting we men are, whether we like it or not, dreaming of creative grandeur or accepting it as a fairly impractical enterprise. One day, after a friendly chat about our personal lives and the luck we’d each had with our respective patient wives, David read the seven pages I handed him. He did it in silence while I struggled not to scrutinize him too much, alert to the slightest change of expression, sipping coffee with eyebrows arched and smoking like a man on death row, cigarette after cigarette, butt to tip, tip burning down to butt, then again butt to tip. Smoke and more smoke. When he finished he said that it had impressed him—my story, not my Bogart or Belmondo impression.
“Damn! I can smell the maturity…If I didn’t know you’d stolen time from other duties, I’d swear your pages were those of a professional. I sure wish I could write so naturally, as if without thinking, about something that’s so close to us all.”
Rare right now, the airplanes. Before, the planes taking off from Logan tracked a path I saw from my pillow in bed, high lights wing-blinking in the night sky in ascent from Boston. Not anymore. Not for now. Before February of this year, the planes blurred into the texture of the everyday, cigarette wisps of contrails, sky-height roar, as regular as the honking geese, which sometimes I notice and sometimes disappear into the familiar static of any afternoon, by the river. Now, I see an airplane and think: Who’s going anywhere? And why? Then I remind myself it could be cargo, small packages, love letters. To see an airplane now is to be aware of both presence and lack: Oh, look, there one is; oh, gosh, I notice because they’ve been mostly gone. And then comes the press of knowing, the weight across the chest, the reminder why.
The gravity of knowing. “The more you know the more you think,” Anne Carson said recently. And the more you think the more you question. What are we supposed to know? What’s better sensed than understood? What happens when the gravity of knowing threatens to tear apart and turn upside down the way the world has existed for you? Do you run away?
It isn’t often that we are tasked with thinking about the history of the food that we eat, unless it shows up in a Jeopardy! question or we ask our informal family historians to detail whose mother passed down this or that version of pound cake. But there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention: for curiosity’s sake; for deepening an appreciation of and respect for cooks, food, and technique; and for gathering perspective on what came before us. “Very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes,” Olver wrote on the Food Timeline. “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn related to ancient Roman minces.”
The problem is that these days we’re overloaded with bad information that can be accessed instantaneously, with few intermediaries running quality control. “I think it’s a little too easy to turn to the web,” Oliver, who was also a longtime friend of Olver’s, told me as we talked about the legacy of Food Timeline. “What I worry about is that people aren’t learning critical thinking skills. Once in a while I run into someone who has never used a primary source — wouldn’t know it if it hit them on the head. Libraries are where you’d find that stuff. It’s not the same as using a Wikipedia page at all.” Or, if not a library, a mammoth resource compiled by a certified reference librarian herself. Whenever a reader would write in asking a question, or when Olver herself would become interested in the provenance of a certain food, she’d turn to her personal library of thousands of food books, and her litany of professional resources and skills, and write out detailed answers with sources cited on her website.
In a world that is endlessly reshaping itself in the grips of malign and incomprehensible powers, we are all hapless Punchinellos, like B. And yet it is only through being such that we can find — as Kaufman’s novel does, too — anything resembling grace.
In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same.
I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.
The dun-colored hills have been good to me
And the gold rivers.