Customer Reviews

Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The title is very misleading. It's more a book about the protagonist's (and I suspect the author's) dysfunctional family than preparing for the big dinner party. Why do so many books these days have to be about dysfunctional families? I'm sick of it already. The protagonist also thinks it's rocket science to throw a dinner party. Get over it. Very formulaic. If author had stuck to the one idea, the book would probably have been too short to publish.

Foodies are bound to be curious about the recipes alluded to in the subtitle of this piquant autobiographical first novel, but the ingredient lists and step-by-step kitchen instructions capping each chapter are mere snacks compared with the real meat of this tale: how and why the narrator, a freelance food writer, has come to dread the dinner parties for which she is the toast of the town. As she plans the menu for what could be the most important soiree of her career, the hostess-with-the-mostest takes us on a journey through her life, navigating modern Los Angeles with extended detours to her Castro Valley childhood growing up in a family that was anything but normal. The flashbacks are vividly and unsparingly rendered through the eyes of a young girl struggling to make sense of a home and dinner table loosely shared with an unhinged mother, a distant father, two phantom brothers and a misfit sister. Ultimately, "Entertaining Disasters" is about family and how, like food, it can bring us both pleasure and pain, and either sustain us or not.

With all the attention in the last decade to food and food culture, foodies, the Food Network and the elevation of chefs to the status of religious leaders, here comes a narrator to remind us that there is life after dinner. The wonderfully named FW is an original creation, a witty woman traveling in the fast lane of magazine food writing whose own dark back story catches up with her as she heads toward a climactic rendezvous with truth -- or the lack of it -- in what she does for a living. Ms. Spiller's winning prose style, familiar to newspaper and magazine readers on the West Coast, has never been better as she stretches out in this alternately amusing and harrowing autobiographical novel. Quite a feat -- or, more appropriately, feast.

Nancy Spiller has the rare ability to comment honestly on the truth that lies beneath our contemporary social niceties with such knife sharp wit that the reader actually laughs out loud. This is a literary novel, with words of weight and truth born of courageous self-examination, that will invite every foodie who ever tried to throw a dinner party to reflect on what was not said at the table.

If you care about perceptive writing and great food, get this book. The recipes are a bonus (I am going to try the lamb and prunes), but even better are the tips and opinions about food sprinkled throughout. Where else will you find out which is the best of all the hundreds of balsamic vinegars in the world? The author writes from experience, having written food articles for the LA Times. But Julia Child was never this frank about her life and family. The combination of that open examination with the sensory delight of food adds up to a book that is not just read, but experienced. And not soon forgotten.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was well written with much attention to detail. It was almost like poetry in places. Food was a main ingredient, but family issues played an important role. I was transported to another time and place whenever I picked up this book.

A good read. Yes, this is a novel with recipes. The recipes here, however, are not simply filler, but rather uncannily reflect the book's exceptional emotional range. Moving from skillfully skewering the hazards of contemporary life in Los Angeles, to portraying a suburban childhood clouded by a mentally unstable parent, this is a work that can in the same page, be funny and devastating. Ultimately, I feel Entertaining Disasters is about nourishment - the ways we try to feed ourselves with food, with lovers, with family, with pets. We're best off, the author implies, when we keep our mouths and hearts open.

I loved this book! It's a page-turner that can be read in just a few sittings. I couldn't put it down.

I love to cook and really enjoyed that aspect of the book, including the references to food history and gourmet dishes; but what was really compelling was the story of the dysfunctional family environment that shaped the narrator's later life. It was such a bittersweet tale, both sad and funny but ultimately hopeful.

This novel talks about food as a way into culture for an L.A. Food Writer, who remains unnamed, and who invents great dinner parties to which she fictively invites the scantily disguised famous and stylish. She publishes these stories in a glossy monthly food magazine but doesn't, of course, actually ever GIVE a dinner party, in fact, F.W. hasn't actually entertained in TEN YEARS! Who'd want to entertain, given the fluid, ambient, constantly-in-transit-and-or-flux world in which the F.W. exists? And beneath those worries and dreads (that, for instance, if you invite people over, they might actually COME TO YOUR HOUSE!) are the scars of what looks to some of us like a fairly average suburban childhood, that of being stuck at home being raised by a crazy mom, which may have resulted in the F.W. being unable to admit she's susceptible to flux, which is what happens when you pick up the phone and dial out. I loved this book. And, the recipes are amazing!

The title, back-cover description and blurbs led me to expect a witty, clever novel about an LA-area food writer. Instead, I got that story (but not very witty) interspersed with some harrowing flashbacks of growing up with a mentally ill mother, as well as some parts from the mother's point of view. It might be exactly what the author intended, but it's not at all what the publisher has positioned it as. So very different that what I expected, or what I was looking for as I wandered through the bookstore -- this is going straight to the library sale.

I loved Nancy Spiller's novel -- a richly-layered tale of food and family, seasoned with recipes. FW, an unnamed LA food writer, is famous for her descriptions of intimate and coveted dinner parties, but these fetes are imaginary: She makes them up. When a visiting food critic invites himself to one of these parties, cracks appear in FW's tenuous façade. As she prepares for what promises to be a disaster, she is forced to dip into a past that threatens to consume her. FW's mother, once a great cook, descends into madness; the family collapses; and the child FW attempts to care for herself ' through cooking. Luscious, keen, and infused with emotional intelligence, Entertaining Disasters is a marvelous exploration of artifice and truth. It speaks to the hungers, betrayals and loneliness within families and the ways we attempt to feed the empty spaces inside.