A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.I can't honestly say that I enjoyed reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but the constant upset and frission that it produced in me means that Aimee Bender certainly wrote a book that affected me, and I'm having trouble deciding where that places it on the like-to-love scale.
Just before her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein developed a curious gift: with just a bite of any food, she can read the cook's emotional state. That she recognised a hollow sadness in her mother's lemon cake was a confusing and terrifying realisation for Rose, and although she tried to describe her problem at first, her mother didn't understand (It's empty? Like I forgot an ingredient?). Years go by and Rose tries to negotiate the emotions in the foods she eats -- from the school cafeteria to her friend's lovingly packed lunches to the welcome sterility of factory-packaged junk food -- and although she makes a few attempts to explain to other people what it is she goes through, Rose remains distant from most people -- and especially from her own family -- only getting edible glimpses of her mother that she tries to suppress.
What I found upsetting about this book is just how isolated everyone was. Rose's mother, Lane, is beautiful and lost; she is naturally good at everything but could never find what she wanted to do with her life. Rose can taste her mother's pain, but doesn't ask her about it, and other than an early breakdown where Rose cried uncontrollably about wanting to remove her own mouth, Rose never tried to tell her mother what she went through. Instead, she decided to become her mother's secret keeper:
I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would likely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.Rose's father Paul -- a kind and decent Provider who was blind to the unhappiness around him -- has his own quirk: he is unable to enter hospitals; had to watch for news of his children's births from the sidewalk across the street. Wanting to make some kind of connection with him, Rose started to watch TV with him in the evenings:
It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.Rose's brother Joseph is a genius, averse to human touch, and his mother's favourite (her it). There's a strange ritual (once Lane takes up woodworking) where Joseph would spend an hour every week removing the splinters from his mother's hands, but even this wasn't really about touch or human connection:
That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.So there's all this pain and no one is acknowledging it and the years go by and it isn't until Rose hits her twenties that anything changes and she learns that she may not be the only one in her family with a special power **spoiler** Joseph worked on transforming into furniture until, unable to bear the pain of existing in the real world any longer, turned into a folding chair for good. Paul revealed that, not only could his father "read people" by smelling them, but he suspects that he would be able to heal people in hospitals and that's why he avoids them. ** end spoiler** And then the book ends with maybe a glimmer of hope for Rose as she explores how she might use her gift (which has evolved into her also being able to separate out ingredients in food and identify what State or factory or farm they came from).
People who apparently know the difference declare that The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake isn't magical realism so much as surrealism, but either way, there's an element of unrealism that prevented me from connecting with these characters and their story: for a novel about emotions, I didn't get these people emotionally, and that might be the point, and I might not be smart enough to see what's really going on here (since critics seem to universally love it). But it can't be dismissed either: the writing was consistently very interesting, and like I started with, this book shook me up. I'm having a heart and head conflict about this one, and that's likely Bender's intention, and therefore she succeeded, so it's a hesitant and qualified four stars.
I read this book because Aimee Bender wrote the only short story referenced in The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey that I couldn't access online (or at my library). In that story, Ironhead, apparently a mom and dad with pumpinheads give birth to a son with an ironhead and it's considered a grave birth defect and doesn't lead to a happy ending. That should have tipped me off to the kind of surrealism that Bender works with, and although this book isn't on my list of favourites, I would be interested in exploring her work some more in the future.
