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453 of 472 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
So much spice, and yet the broth is insipid., December 10, 2009
This review is from: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (Hardcover)
Julie Powell tries in her second book to show the world that she has an important voice of her own--that she can do more than ride on the coat-tails of greater talents that have gone before her. So it is a far from encouraging sign that she starts by stealing a title--double entendre and all--from another memoir published not ten years earlier ("Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage," by Dennis and Vicki Covington).
Perhaps she has a better claim to the pun, as she alternates vignettes of apprenticing at a butcher shop and the near-destruction of her marriage. But what is the point of all these boudoir to abattoir smash cuts? They lose their shock value fast. If she has some spark of an idea about meat being meat, or butchery resonating with infidelity, it is nothing more than a spark: gone in an instant, yielding neither light nor heat. Nothing connects the disjointed elements of the book except that they all happened to the author. As Churchill is supposed to have said, "This pudding has no theme." The education of a butcher, the confessions of an adulterer, the bizarre lurch into travel writing late in the book...nothing binds it together into an appetizing whole. You'd think she'd have gotten the point of stews after making all that Boeuf Bourguignon and Coq au Vin in the last book.
Oh, and the recipes, randomly strewn in there because...well, why not, I guess. We had pork chops that night so here's a recipe for them. It makes no more sense than anything else in here, but at least it makes no less. (To see this kind of thing done right, try John Lanchester's "The Debt to Pleasure.")
The details of the craft of butchery--reducing things that are still recognizably animals into those lovely steaks and roasts and so forth--are interesting. There might have been a good magazine article in there. But it's nothing to really ponder or ruminate on or share with a friend: no David Foster Wallace reporting from the lobster festival. (And I regret spending my time on this when more than one person has recommended to me Bill Buford's 2006 memoir "Heat," as an example of _this_ kind of thing done right.)
And as to the murky reaches of the human heart, how two people can inflict such pain on each other, live in such misery, and yet be unable to just call it off, well, I sure hope you weren't looking for any kind of insight. Stuff happens: that's about as deep as it gets. An old flame calls up and a two year affair begins, because...well, it just does. Powell moves out for a while, and moves back in. The flame: breakup, reunion, breakup, and round we go. At one point, pork chops are cooked. Then things seem to more or less work themselves out. The trouble is that there's far more to profundity than honesty. Powell doesn't seem to have an idea of why she or anyone else does anything--everything takes place in a foggy land of the passive voice. Perhaps there's no way to expect her to have a perspective to share: it's all too fresh, too traumatic. But that leaves us with nothing much in the "affair" passages but the catharsis of unloading it all...and the primal scream therapy is just wearying long before even the halfway mark. There is one moment that comes close to something important, in what has already become an infamous scene of the author having sex with a stranger, but then the moment is gone. A paragraph or two hinting at what could have been a far more disturbing, but also profound and meaningful work. Not for the sex--for the glimpse into the author's psyche. But a glimpse is all you get.
I would like to say that even though I don't think "Cleaving" is a very good book, it has received a lot of unwarranted criticism, largely from people who wanted this to be a sequel to the feel-good biopic largely based on Julia Child's "My Life in France" (which is a really _good_ memoir), but taking its title and most of its popcorn-break moments from Powell's "Julie and Julia." These people seem to think that "Cleaving" is a bad book because Julie Powell is a bad person. I don't think they could be any more wrong on that point. Does "Othello" fail as art because Iago is a bad person? No. "Cleaving" fails because it, ultimately, has nothing important to say.
Just sound and fury, people. Sound and fury.
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253 of 266 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Where narcissism and insecurity converge, December 11, 2009
This review is from: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (Hardcover)
If you are someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, of civility, or even in simply basic respect for other human beings, this is NOT the book for you.
Throughout the book, Powell is consistently despicable. I know that's harsh, but it's true. Julie Powell cheats on her husband: first in college before they're married, then again, and again, and again during their marriage. She returns to her husband, promising fidelity, only after her situation forces her to return - and she has no intention of honoring her promise of fidelity. She only stops seeing her boyfriend when HE breaks it off, and even then she (by her own admission) stalks him for several months. I'm not a traditionalist when it comes to marriage, and I respect and appreciate that different people are in different situations that may not always involve monogamously living happily ever after. But Powell wants it both ways. She wants a traditional marriage. But she also wants her husband AND boyfriend to both dote on her lovingly and exclusively, with no jealousy or repercussions.
To give an example of exactly why I stand behind the harsh descriptor "despicable," let me illustrate with something from the latter third of the book. On a trip to Tanzania, Powell is on a safari and hooks up with the tour guide. Not only is this months after she's professed her renewed devotion (once more) to her husband, but it's culturally inappropriate (and in fact, she is almost assaulted because of it). Powell's description of the make-out session? After the tour guide breaks it off - and HE breaks it off, she clearly states - she says that she is proud of herself. Proud that she had the courage to make out with him, and proud that she let him break it off. I think it takes pride and courage to stand up for what you believe in... which for Powell is evidently her affairs.
Even in one of the latest scenes, she promises her husband that she won't sleep with her boyfriend anymore because - get this - "she's not sure that's something he wants." She wants her readers to empathize, but I don't empathize with the meanderings of a sad, sad woman who wants so desperately to feel attractive that she stoops to anonymous sex to make herself feel good, all while lying to her devoted husband and stalking her "lover".
Her husband is essentially a doormat throughout the book. Powell gives him no depth or dimension beyond a man who is willing to put up with anything - anything - she throws at him, and it's not a flattering portrayal. Her emotional abuse of him shows them both in a negative light - her, for treating him as such, and him, for not only tolerating it but at times seeming to come off as encouraging.
Other reviews, both here and professional, have praised Powell's writing as the redeeming quality of this book. Powell is a good blogger, but I would not call her a good writer. I had no trouble finishing the book, but her writing relies almost exclusively on overdone prose and extended metaphors that feature Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a literary trope. This is not writing that will stand the test of time. Even the metaphor inherent in the premise of the book, butchery v. marriage, is trite. Throughout the book the butchering, only moderately interesting at best, is a weak catalyst for the affairs that Powell would prefer to be talking about.
And the last third of the book, wherein Powell travels abroad? Just skip it entirely and go read something from the "travel essays" section of your bookstore. The same can be said for her simplistic and totally unnecessary inclusion of recipes. Her self-absorption drips from these recipes, which include steps wherein you are supposed to massage your wife's feet or, of course, watch Buffy while cooking.
Writing this book may have been cathartic for Powell, but it is miserable to read.
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114 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Public Therapy, December 27, 2009
This review is from: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (Hardcover)
I always complete a book once starting it (even one that is thoroughly unenjoyable,) but "Cleaving" proved quite a challenge. It is a failure on every level. The inadequacies begins with the writing. Butchery is an appropriate (if somewhat obvious) metaphor for what the author is doing to her life, but her descriptions, while detailed, are flat and uninspired. There is no magic, no startling descriptions or cunning observations. She simply walks the reader through her literal manipulation of the meat, probably thinking that this will be shocking enough to impress the reader. She never does the heavy lifting to transform that aspect of the text into something more than a (rather boring) technical manual.
Her recounting of her marital infidelity is so self-indulgent and unreflective that the fact that she saw fit to publish it in such a raw, unimaginative form is probably the ultimate insult to her benighted husband (who does not appear as a real person in the memoir--merely a doormat with legs). There's something abusive in her literary treatment of him. It's as though she's pathologically incapable of caring about others (including her husband or lover), and her arc culminates in complete acceptance of, and pride in, her lack of empathy. Even more pathetically, while she emotionally abuses her husband and attempts to manipulate her no doubt terrified lover, she is slavishly and compulsively obsessed with winning the approval of the "cool kids" at the butcher shop--it reads as almost a type of personality disorder, but clearly isn't recognized as such by the author. Instead, we're treated to pages and pages of how "sexy" she has become (truly a feat considering that, after being subjected to her insipid musings and navel-gazing for hundreds of pages, the last word I would use to describe this author is "attractive")!
The "racy," "boundary-pushing" sex in this book is (1) nearly non-existent, (2) completely unchallenging and unrelated to the themes of the book, and (3) probably a publisher's ploy to drum up curious readers.
There are recipes sprinkled throughout the book in a random and distracting way. They have nothing to do with the plot or pacing. I'm not sure an editor ever bothered to do a complete read-through.
The most offensive moment of the book occurs during the "world tour of meat" near the end of the book (again completely unrelated to everything that happened before). Ms. Powell describes with complete and offensive thoughtlessness a highly charged sexual incident with truly disturbing racial and imperialist overtones. It's like reading "Passage to India" from Adele Quested's unchallenged and untranscended perspective and is truly upsetting. Later, we are treated to Ms. Powell's reveling in contemplation of her near-rape--an experience which catapults her to new levels of obliviousness.
This is one of the most unintentionally depressing books I've ever stumbled across. I hope Ms. Powell gets the help she desperately needs and that next time her therapy will be performed in private.
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