Editorial Assistant Book Club: July 2023
Literary Layoffs, National Dish, and Ubiquitous Barbie
Biggest “News” in Books: Changing of the Guard
The big publishing news this last week was that the largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, did a major round of buyouts and layoffs. In total this numbered 60 people mostly older employees, at least 60+ years old and with 15+ years’ experience just at Penguin Random House, who took buyouts. For all of the talk of “market conditions” and “rising costs” from the company’s official statements, it didn’t take a crystal ball to realize this was coming ever since they lost $200 million in their failed acquisition attempt of Simon & Schuster last year. The grim reality is that in a low-growth industry like book publishing these are positions that will be slow to come back—if they ever do—and, like in any industry, this action by the largest publisher may cause competitors to copycat the buyouts and layoffs. The slim and unpromised silver lining is that it will make room from more career growth for those on the lower rungs of Penguin Random House. And it would have been one thing if they did this out of the blue, but that reasoning is really sugarcoating what seems like a straightforward “lose a lot of money, cut some jobs” business decision.
Editorial Assistant Book Club: National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by Anya Von Bremzen (June 20, 2023)
Nonfiction Writing
This month we read National Dish by Anya Von Bremzen for our non-bestseller, non-celebrity-pick book club. Anya Von Bremzen is the author and co-author of a half dozen cookbooks, a memoir, and is overall a highly-acclaimed food and travel writer. National Dish follows the author’s journey to six countries—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Istanbul—to explore the current food/foods dubbed the national dish of that country, researching the origins of the dish’s history, and asking what that dish exemplifies about the culture.
Last month when we discussed Emma Cline’s novel The Guest we talked about establishing with contemporary literature if the book is accomplished on a technical level before tackling more critical questions. And there’s no doubt Von Bremzen can write on a line level. She has an erudite, intellectual style, but—no surprise—this three-time-James-Beard-award-winning author can express her thoughts quite clearly. Yet National Dish is a reminder that technical writing in nonfiction is not always so much about how to write beautiful, smart sentences, but in making the correct choices sentence by sentence. In fiction we might call this stringing together of quality sentences “storytelling,” in nonfiction one might think of this cumulative effect as “building toward a point of view.”
The nature of nonfiction is more informational. While in fiction you can effectively let the reader wonder what was left unsaid (read any Raymond Carver story and you’ll get the idea), in nonfiction you generally have to come out and say what you’re trying to say. This is both the nonfiction writers’ gift and curse—they have a lot more information at their disposal than fiction writers, but the curse is that they have to pick out of this mountain of information the correct thoughts, experiences, and research, and arrange it all in the right order.
Falling Between Two Chairs
An analogy that I first heard during my early days in publishing was that a book was “falling between two chairs.” The person never stopped to explain what they meant by this, and it’s one of those phrases that gives off an intuitive meaning, but is a head-scratcher if you think about it too much. My own personal, invented meaning of this phrase is that if you have two chairs and you try to sit on both of them at once, rather than choosing just to sit in one, then you’ll find yourself in an uncomfortable position.
National Dish unfortunately falls between more than two chairs. It’s part travelogue of places and people, part food book, part history, and part political critical theory. If you were expecting an intensive investigation of each of the foods featured on the cover, like I was, you will be disappointed. The book shifts fairly routinely between Von Bremzon’s first-person narrative exploring and talking with food experts and chefs, detailing the actual food, historical anecdotes about how the food came to prominence, and a political examination of how a dish becomes “a national dish.” These parts, however, do not sing a harmony to some greater thesis and as a writer she ends up not serving any one master. Whether you care most about the actual food, the people and places behind the food, the history of the dish, or the political question altogether of a “national dish”, Von Bremzon offers only a small taste of each at a time on a maddeningly rotating basis.
Food? Travel? None of the Above?
Despite those happy salt and pepper shakers and those gorgeous illustrations of food on the cover, this is not a celebratory book about food. Nor does it really exist in the popular history-told-in-food publishing genre that came to prominence twenty years ago with Mark Kurlansky’s Salt. The actual driving force of National Dish emerges over time and it is primarily that the idea of national dishes, like nations, are driven by the powerful political structures that are usually oppressive and corrupt. Tourism, totalitarianism, capitalism, fascism, colonialism, are just a few of the isms that Von Bermzon lands on for how each country got their national dish.
“Mintz, an American Anthropologist and author of the seminal book Sugar as Power, argued that a national cuisine is a ‘holistic artifice’—a construct, essentially, as I knew so well from my own journey.” (pg. 265)
With nonfiction it all comes back to choice—what kinds of information to focus on. If the point of National Dish was to explore the concept with this critical framework, why not start from the point that the idea of a “national dish” is a farce and build the narrative out from there? Instead, this is danced around throughout the book and then tossed like a grenade in the last chapters. It’s a discordant and disconcerting note when you realize that the author’s point of view is that all of the dishes—which the people she meets talk lovingly about—have been viewed by her primarily as a source of and tool for oppression. The best encapsulation of this whiplash in tone and focus came late into the book as well, consider the following sentence as the author prepares to share a meal with friends:
“As the evening potluck drew near, I found myself thinking more and more about the cosmopolitan nostalgia cult, that particular form of Istanbul mythmaking reanimated in the neoliberal nineties” (pg. 287)
A Good Book
Two weeks ago, we decided at Dear Head of Mine that Most Books are Good. As a reminder:
“Good” in publishing is adjective that describes an average, not a consensus. A good book means some readers will find the book to be great and some will think it is entirely average.
With National Dish I ended up on the average side of this adjective. Still, there is plenty to learn and find interesting in National Dish. For instance, Von Bremzon makes a strong point that national dishes are a rather recent invention of a more well-off world—before the last couple of centuries it seems most people in every country ate some form of gruel soup and the rich ate sugar-covered meat. There are delightful moments during her travels as well, featuring the charming people she meets along the way, who clearly love the food they share with her.
Back Matter: Barbie
Culture is now Barbie. As a member of an industry that struggles to be (read: is almost never) in the middle of the mainstream cultural conversation, this week I am genuinely happy for movies, which I also love. It’s also cool that an “indie” film maker, Greta Gerwig (whose films had grossed a “indie” $300m in worldwide box office before Barbie) doubled the box office of a historical biopic from blockbuster director Christopher Nolan, whose films before Oppenheimer grossed 6.6 billion dollars. Yet my cynical self still saw that Barbie, in addition to a $100m marketing campaign (not far from the standard for a film of this size) had 100 brand “collaborations.” I’ll reserve judgment until I see the film this weekend, but if art needs 100 brands to reach the mainstream it will be hard ever to count this fully as a win even if the film is great. It is a signal that brands and corporations have more sway with people than the art itself.