Do you get the feeling that Laura Shapiro, reviewing the new M. F. K. Fisher biography for the New York Times Book Review, is not so entranced with the book’s subject?
Though her subject was food, it needn’t have been: she could have been writing about clocks or Christmas trees, and they would have sent her prose wafting dizzily into the realms of love, death and desire, just as tangerines and oysters did….
Readers tumbled blissfully into the concoctions of sensuality and fantasy that swirled across her pages, and to many aspiring authors her style was irresistible. A heady narcissism, feverishly laced with romantic innuendo, became the new mode in evocative food writing. [all emphasis added]
I recognize myself in there–the reader who has read Fisher blissfully again and again–but Fisher herself, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t answer to Shapiro’s snarky descriptions. In the third paragraph of the review, Shapiro as much as admits that she’s the opposite of a fan:
But who was she? Who was that mysterious woman sitting alone in a restaurant, relishing a meal she had chosen so astutely that the other diners, even the waiters, were stunned? Who was that narrator so elusive we can only picture her veiled? Anyone who has ever asked this question, either in pleasure or in mounting irritation, will pounce….
You can guess which way Shapiro asked that question. Irritation is the keynote of this dismissive and bored review. It ultimately ends up “pouncing,” indeed, on some of the less pleasant of biographer Joan Reardon’s revelations about Fisher. Shapiro seems to have been only too glad to hear them. If I sound irritated myself, it’s not because I require other readers to share my near-veneration (yeah, I’ll cop to it) of Fisher’s prose but because Shapiro doesn’t bother to actually make any sort of real case against it. She instead lazily slings around some snide innuendo that conjures up, weirdly, a flighty Fisher whose aesthetic has a lot in common with a perfume commercial. Which is ridiculous, as I’ll explain below. As a bonus, the review manages to condescend mightily to Fisher’s admirers, who “tumble” into the books rather than reading them, and the most dedicated of whom are suspected of being “aspiring authors” (the horror!) or trend-surfing foodies. If you ask me, she seems awfully suspicious–suspiciously suspicious–of pleasure, in eating or reading. And so, perhaps, not the ideal reviewer of Poet of the Appetites.
Far more fair, balanced, and credible in his description of Fisher’s work is Brian Thomas Gallagher, who reviews the same biography for Bookforum this month (kisses hereby blown to Cinetrix for the link-up):
M.F.K. Fisher is, more than anything else, a literary seductress. Her writing, always sensual but never decadent, draws the reader near her. Whether she is at the dinner table, on a transatlantic cruise, on a country walk in Dijon, or somewhere else more private, one wishes to join her in her pleasures.
This focus on the proximity of the experiences Fisher describes in her best essays is just right. Most of the pleasures she evokes are modest, small, tactile. Even if she does make great claims for their metaphysical significance, the pleasures themselves remain lodged in the sensual world with all its contingencies.
Gallagher also gives Fisher’s readers a little credit for being sophisticated enough to know that her writings did not record the gospel truth:
There was already little doubt that M.F.K. Fisher the protagonist differed significantly from M.F.K. Fisher the person. It would be hard for any reader of Fisher to believe that she was at once as naive and as worldly as she comes across in her writing. Moreover, such conceits are part of autobiography, and in fact, the writer herself acknowledged this. In a letter to her psychiatrist in 1950, she wondered, “Do I marry M.F.K. Fisher and retire with him-her-it to an ivory tower and turn out yearly masterpieces of unimportant prose?” So while belaboring the fact that there are two Fishers, what Poet of the Appetites does not do well is explore the meaning of the relationship between them.
For this sober paragraph I’m grateful, especially after the gotcha tone of Shapiro’s review, and her overreaching for an original response to Fisher’s work–to the point of ceasing to see that work clearly. Her detractions reminded me of a small aside in a (fascinating) essay (that you should read) in the New Republic last week (do read it). Here Rochelle Gurstein writes about the painter Raphael’s present-day detractors, specifically Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times: “When Kimmelman says he doesn’t ‘get’ Raphael, there is hardly a ripple (except for the irritation felt by those who are tired of critics who try to say shocking things).” I wouldn’t mind entertaining such detractions if they were critically persuasive. Shapiro isn’t out to persuade, or even shock (that would require more energy than she brings)–just to puncture.
The best news here is reported in Gallagher’s review:
Fortunately, to coincide with the biography, North Point press has just reissued five of her best works. An Alphabet for Gourmets, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, Serve It Forth, and, Fisher’s loveliest book, The Gastronomical Me, have all recently become available in paperback (though one is still probably better off with the single-volume collection The Art of Eating, which contains them all).
And here is the only particular in Gallagher’s review I must take issue with. Spring for the five individual volumes; they’re lovely objects, especially the photographs of Fisher that grace their covers, which Bookforum has smartly reproduced alongside the review.
As for me, I may well return to those fab five in the near future. But I’ll skip the biography, thanks anyway.