Customer Reviews

American Appetites

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I'm not very enthusiastic about this book although I finished it. The story had some strange and disturbing twists, but never really gripped this reader. It reminded me in some ways of Bonfire of the Vanities--big shot gets in lots of trouble with the law--but with a very different kind of ending. Basically though the characters seemed humorless and drab. They didn't seem to be drawn from life (unless perhaps your life is Princeton where I believe Oates is a faculty member). In the dialogue the characters kept saying things like "Why on earth did you...?" and "What earthly reason was there for...?" The earth was invoked in this way at least forty times. I guess I never figured out what on earth the author was trying to get across except that even apparently happy and successful lives can be pretty aimless and depressing--like this book. If that turns you on, by all means read it.

"interstices" is another oft-repeated word. I found this book's main characters so annoying about midway through the book; people do things that make no sense, or an aspect of their chacter that would cause them to behave this way is missing. The ending is weird both in its brevity and occurance, and the book also feel dated, from the 1980's - who wants to relive the 80's in upper-class suburbia?

This book is set at the end of the 1980's, a decade rightly or wrongly remembered as being about the celebration of greed. The "appetites" of American consumers in that ten years and in this novel itself, for food, for clothing, cars, toys, sex, even for lurid news stories to draw them away from the boredom the collective excesses of an age of plentitude cannot cure, are given the weight of Oates' keen judgment.

The novel opens with the seemingly placid life of a middle-aged married couple, Glennis and Ian, who reside in a wealthy New York suburb nestled in the foothills of the Hudson River. The couple is wealthy, prosperous, respected, and by all measures of the 1980's, successful: as a bonus, they are even happy. At the beginning it seems there is simply no plot to create out of a setting so ideal. But Oates has other ideas...

The central story here is about the accidental death of Glennis, a famed cookbook writer, who falls or is shoved backward through the magnificent plate glass picture window of her dining room, in the midst of an explosive argument that began with a drunken Glennis falsely accusing her husband, Ian, of having an extra-marital affair. Though he is grief-stricken at the loss of his wife, the only woman with whom the vaguely staid Ian has ever been intimate, a death that seemed doubly shocking considering how important Glennis was to the first quarter of the novel during which she appeared with her well-written, three dimensional aspects poised to assume the role of central character, Ian finds himself accused of murder, arrested, and placed on trial, The case gathers steam and what had initially began as a clear example of a misunderstanding grows in intensity until it is covered by media on a national level. Ian, more or less innocent of wrongdoing in his wife's death, throughout the book never rising above the sorrow at his loss, hires the best of lawyers but soon realizes that with the multitude of lies wedged against the truth, his future looks grim, indeed. He tells the truth but the muddled facts seem to condemn him. Only his and Glennis' daughter stands on his side, truly convinced of her father's innocence. Ian comes to realize his entire fate rests in the hands of a young woman he barely knows and has not been able to locate, the stranger he had been trying to help and with whom Glennis was convinced he was having an affair. Ian struggles to find the woman, but she seems to have vanished: possibly, given the nature of the circumstances that compelled Ian to help her in the first place, she might be dead, herself.

American Appetites is not the courtroom drama this review or any description of its plot might make it appear to be. Using food and elaborate cookbooks as a metaphor for the inexhaustible "hunger" of American consumers for stimulus of any pleasurable sort, Oates shows us late-twentieth-century society in all its gluttonous excess, and weaves in a suspenseful battle for a man's life while she's at it.

I'm not very enthusiastic about this book although I finished it. The story had some strange and disturbing twists, but never really gripped this reader. It reminded me in some ways of Bonfire of the Vanities--big shot gets in lots of trouble with the law--but with a very different kind of ending. Basically though the characters seemed humorless and drab. They didn't seem to be drawn from life (unless perhaps your life is Princeton where I believe Oates is a faculty member). In the dialogue the characters kept saying things like "Why on earth did you...?" and "What earthly reason was there for...?" The earth was invoked in this way at least forty times. I guess I never figured out what on earth the author was trying to get across except that even apparently happy and successful lives can be pretty aimless and depressing--like this book. If that turns you on, by all means read it.

By the way, Oates in this book uses the two most overused words in the English language: "rebarbative" and "epicene." If you know what these words mean without having to look them up, American Appetites is for you.

This saga of successful lives torn apart by murder, Oates's 19th novel, appeals to the more sophisticated, mature reader. Ian and Cynthia McCullough, apparently happily married for 26 years, living interesting but average lives (Ian is a demographic expert working in social science research and Glynnis is a food writer working on a cookbook tentatively titled "American Appetites") are suddenly involved in a drunken brawl. Glynnis falls through a window and dies. Ian is charged with murder, goes to trial.

This story, in the hands of one of America's most skillful writers, turns out to be an expose of evidence against American appetites for food, wine, drink, power and sex. This is superb fiction that works on several levels, leaving the thoughtful reader with a great deal to think about.