I hope that we all have places in our lives in which we allow ourselves to be a bit sloppy. I also hope that we all have places in our lives in which we allow ourselves to imagine. But this is one month a year we get to harness both together.
It’s possible to divide the world in two: the part that venerates the humble-seeming fruit known as the date, and the part that does not. The part that does is home to hundreds of millions of people, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco across North Africa and Egypt to Mesopotamia and east to India. In this part of the world there aren’t really “dates,” because only a philistine would speak in such generalizations. There’s the plump sugar-bomb medjool, the chewy khalas beloved of Emirati connoisseurs, sweet and sticky Saudi sukkary, tart yellow barhi peeled and eaten fresh, the varieties picked early, called rutab, and served frozen with coffee at the upscale cafés of Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. There’s ajwa from Medina, said to be the favorite of the Prophet, the dark Persian kimia, the translucent deglet noor, and many others with evocative names like halawi or Sagai VIP.
As an Englishman, my relationship with jerky is like my relationship with a Bloody Mary — it’s not a thing where I’m from, but it looks cool. I want nothing more than to be able to confidently swill a half pint of tomato juice and chomp on a vodka-soaked pickle to ease my hangover, or chow through a bag of torn cow flesh like a real cowboy man. But then I’m reminded that it tastes bad. I’ve never gotten to the bottom of a Bloody Mary glass, or bag of dried beef. But this isn’t your average jerky.
Habanero buffalo, teriyaki ahi tuna, black pepper ostrich. Dozens of jerkies in front of me. I ask the server what the most popular offering is — “Spicy Memphis BBQ … soft,” she says, confidently. She bags up a handful for me and I shuffle across the tiles to the next attraction in this 26,000-square-foot room that claims to be the biggest gas station in California — EddieWorld.
“Flight” slips free of its tight narrative frame: More than just a domestic tale, it is a larger portrait of hearts and minds at war with the tedium of everydayness and the rote routines of relationships. As Tess notes of her own sisters, “The love among them was complicated, stunted, sometimes painful.” Grab a mug of egg nog, good readers, and dive in.
These days, teenagers of the 1990s find themselves in the bizarre position of having to conjure their childhoods as if they had taken place in the 1890s. Is life before smartphones really so alien? American teens still drive around with their nascent licenses, listening to questionable music, eating Pop-Tarts from gas stations (possibly, chillingly, the same Pop-Tarts). More important, they still develop intense and thrilling friendships. In his fourth novel, “Now Is Not the Time To Panic,” Kevin Wilson (best known for “Nothing to See Here” and “The Family Fang”) addresses the contours of this liminal time, capturing the still-relevant feeling of trying “to remember what was in the cassette player, if it was cool.” His is a buoyant tribute to small-town life, a book about creativity and creation in a world before “send” buttons.
And now he’s written “Novelist as a Vocation,” a reflection on his career. It blends writing advice and memoir, tracking his early triumphs — in typically magical Murakamian fashion, he won a prize for his first novel after submitting his only copy of the manuscript to the judges — through his years as an international star, his work translated into more than 50 languages, his betting odds for the Nobel Prize very short each October.
The result is a book that’s assured, candid and often — never meet your heroes, they say — deeply irritating.