30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 1: "Sweetbitter"

Let’s kick off the series with a glass of wine and a burst of excess, shall we?

I first read a review of Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter last summer and was surprised to find myself intrigued. I waited hungrily for a copy to become available from my library, but I’ll admit my expectations were low. I’d read that this was another drawn-from-real-life novel about the seedy underbelly of the restaurant industry and its drug-fueled employees. I thought it would be a quick, breezy read, and I honestly didn’t expect to like it very much.

It was a quick read—mostly because I was continually fascinated—but never breezy. The writing was strong, and the painstaking descriptions of food and wine assaulted the senses, making me salivate as I read and inducing me to turn my bites and sips over more carefully in my mouth with each meal in the days following the read.

First warning: you will want to snack while you read this book.

Second warning: your typical snacks may not cut it.

The story unfolds at an upscale Manhattan restaurant, a thinly-veiled Union Square Café, where the author worked while writing the novel. The book’s characters are creatures of excess, despite their intimate knowledge of the ultimate balancing act that yields good taste, good food. They do drugs, they drink too much—but the potions fueling them are expensive bottles of wine plucked from the restaurant’s cellar, whose notes the staffs’ trained palates can appreciate even when they insist on numbing them. Their snacks are no ordinary snacks, but rather fine cheeses, briny oysters, earthy truffles, meaty figs that they nibble before shifts and to stem hangovers. The characters occupy an interesting locus of extremely privileged and barely holding it together. That ever-teetering balance, too, gives the novel flavor.

The “story” is about Tess, the narrator who moves to New York from an unnamed, unromantic, uninspiring Midwestern town after graduating from college. At 22, she doesn’t know what she wants to be, but she knows that she wants to feel more and be more than she has been feeling and being. She moves to New York with $142 in her bank account and no job. She is quickly hired as a backwaiter at the restaurant, and her story begins. There’s her frightening descent into drug use, there’s a much-foreshadowed love triangle among her, the bartender, and the sommelier. This is the main crux of the narrative—her relationships with these two unique personifications of the restaurant and its associated lifestyle. These aspects of the book, though, were much less interesting to me.

The true “story,” always, is about the restaurant and its potent magic—and it’s a much more interesting character and force than Tess. My biggest problem with the novel is the distance Tess keeps from the reader, even as she dutifully catalogues moments that are a blend of shameful, erotic, dangerous, lonely. We learn barely anything about Tess in her life before New York, and that seems intentional—she writes on page four, “Let’s say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge….” This is not supposed to be a story about Tess’ life, and indeed it appears she didn’t consider herself truly living until she came to the city. Rather, this is supposed to be a story about Tess at the restaurant, and about the restaurant itself, and about New York City. But some of the choices—particularly the more reckless ones—Tess makes seem inexplicable to me, and I credit that to a lack of character development on her part. There are certain somewhat lazy hints at abandonment issues (in the first few pages, she references a mother who left when she was still a baby), but they don’t do enough to make me believe or understand why this person would choose the life she chooses. But then again, her passivity undercuts the novel; in many ways, it seems like Tess, too, is a character in the restaurant’s story, and that she is watching, along with the reader, as life happens to her. And maybe that would be fine, if she could balance the sweet, the bitter, and everything in between.

As a coming of age story, this one feels lukewarm. To care about a character’s coming of age, a reader needs more access to her youth. As a snapshot of a year in the life of a struggling, lost 20-something who finds a very particular niche in the overwhelming expanse of New York City, though, this is a gem.

Rating: 4/5

#recommendations #45 #review #bookreview #modernfiction