Passive vs Active living

Its a review about this product

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman is not at all about what the title might suggest. It is not about cooking; it is about studying cooking by reading instead of actually cooking. But it's not even about that either - it's about yearning for meaning in life, for something tangible, but finding oneself unable to get up and do anything about it. It's about getting stuck in our own inner mayhems, unable to act, to break free, to move forward. It's about being on the outside, looking in.

Longings - of love, of wealth, of answers, of meaning - plague the characters in the book, only most of the time they don't even realize that's the case. It's been at least a decade since I've read or watched Sense and Sensibility, the novel along which this story is loosely based. It is the tale of two sisters completely different in temperament and aspiration, five years apart in age but eons apart in personality, during the rise and fall of the early dotcoms pre- and post- 9/11. Only, we merge in and out of peripheral characters lives and viewpoints, to the point that the picture we have of the sisters, Jessamine and Emily, are mostly that of the men that love them, and so we are also left feeling we are on the outside, looking in, only seeing the surface of people and situations.

Goodman's language is liltingly poignant, insightful and highly quotable, with sentences like

"How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end."
"He could read her face, even as she became a stranger to him."

The book also openly discusses wealth, young wealth, and monetary, financial motivations against spiritual, socially progressive motivations. However, it only discusses wealth from the point of view of the very privileged, very wealthy perspective. The closest we get to financial problems is at the beginning of the novel, Jess is a grad student - of philosophy, and doesn't happen to have $1800 lying around to buy her sisters stock. This is seen by her older, incredibly intelligent, highly successful and fantastically fortunate older sister as a failing on her part to grow up. Either my experience is drastically different from everyone else's, or it's a pretty normal thing for a 23-year-old graduate student to not have a substantial cash reserve in the bank. It's also pretty normal to have not 'grown up' by age 23. And so, while the actual acknowledgment of money as existing was nice, it fell quite flat in that in the end, and like The Social Network, it turned out to be a young millionaire's playground.

Emily's naivete, at 30 by the end of the novel, proved somewhat unbelievable, especially given that she is the CEO of her own company, graduated MIT, and is a multi-millionaire. Reality normally reveals itself in some form or another, through heartbreak, through betrayal by family or friends or lovers, even through things occasionally just not working out according to expectation - that has to happen, at least on some level, by the time you're 28, or 30. We all interact with humans, right? For Emily, reality never manages to even scratch her surface, apparently, until later. She has Jonathan, an Abercrombie, viciously ambitious and very unlikable boyfriend on the other side of the country, dealing with a similar dot com venture, and the relationship never quite makes sense, unless somehow the distance manages to mask true personalities.

My main point of bother with the modern plot was that as CEO of her own company in Silicon Valley, with Jonathan starting and running his company over in Boston, when they talk of the future, the only option to make the relationship work is for her to quit her job and move across the country to be with him. That the converse might occur is not an option. It is not discussed. It is not even mentioned as a point of contention. Even when she puts off moving, making excuses and dragging her expensively clad feet, even then, even in her own private musings, it is not once mentioned as a point of resentment. For such a successful, entrepreneurial, intelligent and "inventive" young woman, even as naive as she is colored, that the issue never comes up is a bit negligent in the plot development. At least include a fight about it, a logical, rational reason that it should be she that moves and not vice versa. But we, as readers, are not given that.

Despite my now seemingly heavy criticism, and despite the flaws I perceived, I actually enjoyed the novel, and was compelled to keep reading. The writing, the language, is superb. Lyrical. It captures much of the discontent and discomfort of that time, as well as the strange realization as youth merges with adulthood that life will never, ever be quite what we'd expected. The discussion of greed and wavering stock markets is all the more relevant after the crash of 2008. The dialogue is scripted, of course, but cleverly, meaningfully so. Because it's been too long since I've read S&S, I can't speak to the legitimacy of the comparison.

The themes are interesting, if not entirely fleshed out, due to the overabundance of character viewpoints in the first half of the book. The ending is satisfying on many levels. That the men somehow manage to take the focus away from the women, in a book about women, is a little strange - but in this world, the plot device might be a clever take on our current culture, and how little it differs from the societal limitations of Jane Austen's time - how far we've come and how far we haven't.