Customer Reviews

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(77)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

If you are a vegan, vegetarian or generally squeamish, don't read this book.

Okay, now that I have that little PSA out of the way, I can tell the rest of you who don't fall into one of the above categories that you shouldn't read this book either. Why? Because it's nothing short of a infuriating description of raging narcissism.

So, Julie Powell is the Julie of "Julie and Julia". Now, I will admit that while I related to her situation in her first book, I did find her well, a little childish and annoying. Luckily, I found Amy Adams to be far more palatable!

Cleaving starts a couple of years after Julie and Julia is published and becomes a big hit. Julie Powell decides that she wants to be a butcher--so she finds an upstate New York to take her in as an unpaid intern.

Now, Julie Powell is a very good writer, which is why Vegans, Vegetarians and the otherwise squeamish shouldn't even try this book. We're talking pages and pages of lurid descriptions of butchering with a few slaughtering scenes thrown in.

For me, though, that wasn't the problem. I actually found the butchering parts to be rather interesting and, ultimately, it was the quality of her writing that made it possible for me to finish this book. What I did find distasteful, to say the least, was the "other" story of the book. You see, Julie Powell has a husband that "completes her" (honestly, has there ever been a more saccharine phrase?) and who is pretty much perfect. So what does Ms. Powell do? Why, she cheats on him of course!

So, she starts an affair with someone she knew from college--or something like that. But the book isn't really about the affair, it's about how crazy she goes after the guy breaks it off. We're talking bunny boiling crazy here--if she hadn't already butchered the bunny, of course.

Disgusting is really the only word I can think of to describe it. And, really, the reader can tell that it's just the beginning of the iceberg as she also recounts an incident or two of anonymous sex (after which she bemoans that she cheated--on her ex-lover who wants nothing do with her. Apparently, the fact that she really cheated on her husband doesn't enter her consciousness) and of alcohol and possible other substance abuse.

Okay, fine...she's messed up. Now, a book about how messed up she is would be one thing. However, she spends this book alternating between explaining why she was entitled to, and DESERVED, to have this affair and why the world is so unfair to her. At one point, she complains about her husband being unreasonable by telling her that she had to break up with her boyfriend before she moved back into their apartment.

Narcissism, I've learned, comes in different packages. The Julie Powell version seems to be one of the worst--the dark Narcissist. You know, those who believe that the world doesn't recognize their supreme greatness and its all they can do to exist among us peons who do not kowtow at their every whim.

Reading over what I've written here, there is a little voice that says I might be just a bit too hard on her. Then I remember what is written in this book and I realize that I'm not. Yes, I sound judgemental--I know that. However, when you write a book like this about yourself, you put yourself out to be judged. That, I think, is what might ultimately bring Julie Powell back down to earth.

Julie's experiences needed to marinate awhile. This memoir is premature and therefore completely self-indulgent because she has very little to share.

She never explores her real reasons for needing sexual validation and her real reasons for becoming so obsessed with a man other than her husband. She doesn't care why she becomes cruel and careless. She's a good writer, but she just isn't ready to dig deep. She seems more interested in making sure we know she likes to masturbate to porn and be tied up than she is in understanding why she can't stop obsessing about her lover and why she needs to be so cruel to her husband.

This book is not brave and revealing. It's a paper trail proving she's made a bunch of mistakes, but isn't much into self-reflection. Brave and revealing would have been waiting and getting to the heart of the inner issues before sharing the devastation she tossed upon her husband and herself with the world. It's galling that she's so sure she deserves our attention. Making a point of informing us of her observation that her boyfriend masturbates with his left hand but eats with his right is a serious cry for attention...that she thinks this trivial piece of information is important is embarrassing. This book is full of gratuitous sexual details and she seems to think she has a penchant for "unusual" sex when a simple trip to craigslist would certainly reveal otherwise. She needs to be viewed as a sexual being so badly that one might wonder if she is too disconnected from herself to be truly sexual at all. Of course, she doesn't seem the least bit interested in excavating something of her sexual self.

She needlessly and unnaturally mentions her alcohol consumption so much that she must be laying groundwork for her next book. She'll probably go off to France to learn wine making while at the same time getting sober so she can write about the conflicts of sobriety through vinification. Save your money, skip this book (and the next) and in a few years, if she matures as a person maybe she'll write one worth buying. This is just disappointing and especially so since she's a gifted writer who wasn't willing to wait until she had a real story.

I checked this book out at the library because I wanted a quick, trashy read over the holidays. It did not disappoint in the trashy department, but I'm not going to judge Powell on a moral level. And there is no doubt that she's a pretty talented writer; it's her voice that turns me off. She is so ridiculously full of herself, it's laughable. She's fearless at gutting pigs, she's a sexual dynamo, her co-workers think she's "f****ing cool," people recognize her on the street, blah blah blah. We get it. Really, we do.

What repelled me the most about this book, though, was how inorganic the whole thing felt. You get the impression that every career move, friendship, love affair, and lame conversation is conducted for the sole purpose of filling Powell's writer's notebook. And fill it she does ... it's 450 pages long!!! Whatever. I read it in two hours. Two hours of my life that you owe me, Julie Powell!

I loved "Julie and Julia" not only because it was such a fun, and entertaining chronicle of a culinary adventure, but I loved the raw honesty and self effacing quality that Julie brought to the book. However, this book displays a completely different writer, someone who clearly has sipped too much from the cup of fame and glory and believes she is indeed Amy Adams from the blockbuster rather than Julie Powell.

I was so very excited to read this book and I did read the entire thing because I was so hoping that eventually Julie would stir up some of the Julie and Julia magic. There are glimpses of it such as her adventures in the Ukraine and Tanzania however, even those end up tainted with the self indulgence she has become accustomed to bathing herself in. I do feel for her because I would imagine the pain of the breakdown of a marriage of such intensity is unbearable, but the pining and obsession (along with the check out line romance novel quality love scene descriptions) cheapens so much of the rest of the book. There's also a lingering self indulgence with the book; it would be embarrassing to count the number of times Julie recounts unrelated tales of men calling her sexy, or beautiful or gorgeous. I certainly dont take issue with a man calling a woman gorgeous, and it seems like from the photos, Julie is a fairly attractive woman, but the desperation which seeps out from the words as the same point is hammered home through the 300 pages left me feeling more like I was reading a diary and less like I was reading a novel.

I really hope that Julie's next book is a return to her conversant style with the reader rather than the voyeuristic obsession she has any reader on in this book. Save yourself the time and money (and possible heartbreak) of this book.

I knew going in this book was not a continuation of the love story and personal struggle to find success that was in Julie Powell's first book Julie & Julia. I knew it was about her long term adulterous affair and oddly sought out internship at a Butcher Shop. But I thought it would still reflect her humor, her relatible bouts of TMI and some sort of arc of redemption or success. If that's what you are hoping for too, keep walking, don't read this book!

It details her two year long affair, her yearlong plus despair after her lover ended the affair, and her ongoing minimal regard for her husband's anguish before, during, and after (he knew virtually the whole time).

It is frankly the most selfish, self absorbed, self delusional book I've ever read. Everything is couched in terms of well "I needed this", "I had to do this". She justifies the whole thing by saying well our picture perfect marriage really wasn't picture perfect and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to find yourself and find your way back. Picture Gov Mark Sanford (remember him?) but this time openly having his affair with his Argentinian soulmate for two years and then being so soul wrenchingly broken when his mistress ends it that he leaves home for a year plus, first with a job as a butcher in a town so far from home he has to rent a nearby apartment, then after that ends he starts traveling solo to countries around the world just to be around butchers, eat an enormous amount of meat, sulk and obsess continually about his lost lover. Then finally decides that the sight and touch of his spouse no longer repluses him and he goes home to get on with his marriage and two days into that has lunch with his old lover and tells his wife they will continue to get together as they have alot to "talk about" but that he promises they probably won't sleep together any more because his ex mistress doesn't seem to want to. Picture that and you got the jist of this whole book.

If that doesn't sound appetizing then picture all the endless desciptions of butchering slabs of dead animals, or better yet actually slaughtering live animals.

I could have lived with all glory details if there just hadn't been so much needless cruelty. I'm talking about what she did to her husband, not the animals. No amount of self exploration justifies carrying on a obessive love affair for two years while still sleeping in the same bed with your husband every night. Knowing that he has read your sobbing, obsessive, pleading texts to your lover both during the affair and the year after when you are so tightly clinging to your lost love that you stalk him both physically and cyber-ly. All while you claim to love your husband like no other, that you are so close you read each other's thoughts, but oh by the way for now (I'm sure it will clear up at some point) the idea of being around him, or touching him kinda makes you wanna hurl.

Once you get married I believe you are no longer entitled to sow oats and figure your spouse will stand patiently by cuz "you need this". If Julie Powell had half the guts she had in her first book she would have divorced her husband and committed herself to her new path. Or she would have found a way to stay faithful and make needed improvements in her less than picture perfect marriage. She chose neither path. In fact she never chooses between any two things. She wants and therefore she haves and haves and haves. Consequences be dammed. And then she writes a book about it. A book filled with so much longing and need for her lover that her husband only skimmed the book, so much TMI that her mother is not allowed to read the book, and many of her friends refuse to read the book. And me? Well I'm sorry I read it. And I predict you will be too.

If you read Julie and Julia, you probably came away really liking the author and loving how she found meaning and stability in a regimen of cooking every Julia Child recipe in Volume 1 of MtAoFC. For God's sake, don't read this book and find out what's been going on since in Julie Powell's life.

This book is a disjointed mess of personal affirmations, rickety justifications, explanations of how to butcher a side of meat, recipes, and many texts sent to mystery lover "D" with one hand while trying to hang onto her relationship with hubby Eric in the other. Depending on your viewpoint, you will find either a woman coming into her own (her view) or a brat running around poor nations as if they were exotic self-discovery spas (mine). I usually wrestle with books to the bitter end, but by the time I was 2/3 done, I went to the end----where nothing is resolved -- and called it a day and a loss of $9.99. Highly discourage purchase of this shambles!!!!!

Ugh. I have exactly 0 empathy for Ms Powell after reading the first half of this and then sparing myself the latter 1/3 and reading only pieces of the last few chapters. You whine about it being unfair that your husband is asking you to break up with your boyfriend? You tell him that he has to deal with the fact that this person is a part of you, buried in you? Ugh. Ugh. Ugh

I could deal with the anti-hero (and I mean that in a sarcastic way) protagonist if the writing or plot were more interesting, but sadly the book fails on that point as well. Totally self-absorbed, insufferable work.