Customer Reviews

In the Kitchen: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Here's my dilemma. Based on In the Kitchen, Monica Ali clearly is a talented writer with an eye for detail and a rare gift for turning a phrase and expressing insights in fresh ways. At the same time, she's produced a novel that is too often a slog and painful to read. There are so many characters, it's hard to keep track of them (particularly all the kitchen staff), and few are especially likable; none are especially engaging. (In 436 pages, I didn't get emotionally involved with any of them--not even the pathetic waif the protagonist takes in or the kitchen crew whose back stories veered from the horrific to the banal.)

The plot just creeps along for 4/5 of the book, until close to the end, when the main character, Gabe, begins to self-destruct in earnest, but by then I just yawned and kept asking, "What is he doing now, and why?" Ali has a tendency to digress into lengthy philosophical discussions with little or no bearing on the plot, and then keep hammering long after her character has made his point. She has an almost obsessive fascination with detail--way, way too much detail--which bogs down the plot, such as it is. More than once I seriously considered just casting the book aside and moving on to the next one in my stack. In the end I finished it, but only just.

So my dilemma: How to rate a book that's so obviously flawed but where the author is so obviously talented? If I could give half-stars, this would probably be three and a half, if only in appreciation for Monica Ali's extraordinary way with words and her extensive knowledge of how restaurants work. I haven't read Brick Lane or seen the movie, so I can't speak to whether In the Kitchen is just a sophomore slump. But I will say that she sure could have used a better editor.

Gabriel Lightfoot is the executive chef of the restaurant at the Imperial Hotel, London. Yuri, the night porter, a Ukranian, is found dead in the basement of the hotel. It seems Yuri had been living there.

Loneliness killed Yuri Gabe surmises. The Imperial Hotel had been built in 1878. Gabe seeks distraction from the kitchen, an incredibly busy place, with his girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer.

When Gabriel learns his father has cancer, he visits and discovers his sister Jenny has made a number of complicated arrangements so that his grandmother and his father are visited two times a day by someone. His circumstances are a common enough situation. Gabe left and Jenny stayed and now Gabe is the more valued. The household had been encumbered, in terms of functioning adequately, by the undiagnosed mental illness of one of its members. This is handled delicately by the author.

The book is funny, colorful, picturesque. Perhaps everyone has worked in a kitchen or at least has imagined what it must be like to work in a large, well-staffed kitchen. The one in the story has a number of employees and is capable of turning out many formal meals. In its complexity, hard work, zaniness, and fun one is reminded of the British series, CHEF.

Gabriel is like everyone. He is a lost man and a confused man. He ponders what family loyalty means. He wants to create his own family, but in the turmoil of conflicting emotions he tells a lie and he misses his chance. Near the end of the book he has a panic attack. Subsequently events have a way of emerging like fireworks racing forward. A nice ending gives the reader hope amidst descriptions of institutionalization and exploitation.

This is ripping.

Monica Ali's third novel, IN THE KITCHEN, is her best book yet. It revolves around an aspiring executive chef, Gabriel Lightfoot, depicted as a troubled man who can never quite get a hold of that dream he is forever chasing. The story opens with a bang, when one of Gabe's co-workers is found dead in the basement of the kitchen. No one is sure if foul play was involved. Why was he even down there in the first place? The clues to this mystery point to the possibility that Yuri was living in the basement and was not alone.

The only other clue is Lena, an unkempt surly Belorussian with a very mysterious past, who has ties to Yuri but no one knows how. Lena is not talking to anyone and refuses to give Gabe any answers. The only thing he knows is that she is an employee working under him, and for reasons even he cannot explain, he is compelled to seek her out after she is let go from her job. He becomes obsessed with Yuri's death, which leads to an obsession with Lena, despite the fact that he already has a girlfriend in what seems to be a rock solid relationship. Against his better judgment, Gabe promptly offers his apartment to Lena when his girlfriend is out of town, and one wonders what his true motives are.

What the reader assumes will be a murder mystery turns into a psychological study of a man whose life slowly falls apart before our eyes. As Gabe broods over the mystery of Yuri's death, he is also dealing with a dying father, which forces him to delve into his childhood, trying to understand what happened in the past that created the strained relationship he has with his father today. His almost naïve unconditional love for his deceased mother and memories of her eventually lead him to things he never understood about her or was even aware were happening.

He is distant with his immediate family, but is forced to acknowledge that his father is ill, thus bringing him back into contact with a sister he no longer recognizes, a father who has remained a distant figure due to some event in Gabe's childhood, and a grandmother who is in desperate need of a caretaker 24/7. And on top of it all, Gabe still must address the fact that he can't seem to get rid of Lena, who is now living in his apartment, and his girlfriend has returned from her trip. There are only so many lies he can keep straight.

Readers may find Gabriel a very unlikable character, but it can't be denied that Monica Ali has successfully written a complex character study that will force one to read the book to the very last page. I, for one, just had to learn how everything turned out for him. His life is in total disarray because of one seemingly random event. When you think Gabe has hit rock bottom, think again; it actually gets worse. One can't help but feel sorry for him, but at the same time, he made the choices that brought all this upon him. IN THE KITCHEN is a good story, but ultimately you may not have any pity for Gabe whatsoever.

--- Reviewed by Marie Hashima Lofton

Monica Ali burst on the scene in 2003 with her novel, Brick Lane and followed up with a second effort, Alentejo Blues, whch suffered from poor review and even worse sales Her current novel, In the Kitchen, however is a worthy successor to Brick Lane, Set in principally in the kitchen of the restaurant of a venerable London hotel, it tells the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, the chef, who has family problems (sick father), love life problems, business problems, and, not the least of it, the discovery of a dead body in the hotel basement. This setting gives Ali a foothold to riff on modern-day themes, including immigration and the sex trade in the context of a story that while sometimes slow, is ultimately very enjoyable.

An up-and-coming chef makes a few poor decisions and experiences a series of consequences that cause a personal crash that seems to stand in metaphorically for the demise of a whole way of life.

It took awhile for me to get into this; frankly, I might not have finished it had it not been a vine book, because I got to page 80 and was not that into it. The main character's disastrous decision to take in a homeless woman and then sleep with her didn't seem all that believable to me. I kept going, though, and it really became worth it as I started to identify with the main character, who was dealing with the competition between his ambitions and his desire for stability, his overloaded work life, and the questions he has about his relations. He also has to encounter past views of the world and England in the form of the views of his dying father and senile grandmother. He has to reinterpret his mother's story. When he undergoes a manic state toward the end of the novel that in some ways allows him to liberate himself from oppression (and also right a wrong), the novel just comes alive. There is also a lot of rumination on "the boom" and how long it can last. From the my perspective, reading during a crash period, this seems amazing.

A slow starter plot-wise, but a really convincing novel for our time.

Ali's lovely way with words made slogging through In The Kitchen almost bearable. In the end the repetitive plot and shallow characters overcome the writing.

Gabriel Lightfoot is the executive chef at the Imperial Hotel on Piccadilly. The kitchen, well, if you've seen Hell's Kitchen on TV, you have an idea, it's not only a kitchen, it's part nuthouse, too. The staff Gab presides over are immigrants of every stripe and there in lies part of the problem of the first part of this book. The author, IMO, spends too much time on their back story, too much time preaching about the plight of immigrants that it slows the first couple hundred pages or so down.

But that this turns into a whale of a novel, so it's worth it, wading through those pages, or maybe you'll just want to skim them, speed read, whatever.

Gab is 42 and dreams of opening his own place and it looks like his dream is about to come true, but there is a body in the cellar that puts a damper on things and sets Gabs life on a course he couldn't have foreseen. He loses his jazz singing girl over a skinny hooker and now we have a bit of preaching against trafficking, but that's necessary for the story, I guess.

Ms. Ali is a gifted writer, to be sure and I know that fiction is supposed to mirror real life, but perhaps those mirrors are a bit too reflective here. Still, the second half of the book held me in my chair like a magnet.

I hadn't read "Brick Lane" Brick Lane: A Novel which was highly acclaimed, so I was looking forward to Monica Ali's new novel. After reading it, I wonder what the hype was all about. An executive chef, Gabriel Lightfoot (?), runs a fancy hotel restaurant while hoping to break into the big time with a restaurant of his own. He struggles with the business of running the place, unsympathetic bosses, and clueless potential investors. Then he compounds the mess by shooting himself in the foot--several times. He is less than truthful about a murder he had no involvement in, inexplicably starts cheating on a wonderful fiancee, and generally self-destructs. Why? One of the problems is that Ali doesn't give us a character we understand.

There are many supporting characters here, but they became hard to keep striaght, especially the characters in the kitchen. They're caricatures, not real people, and part of the story for no apparent reason.

Ali has a great eye for details, and I found the many intricate aspects of running a restaurant sort of interesting. But all in all, I was pretty disappointed, and found it hard to finish.

Monica Ali's second novel, In the Kitchen, focuses on the life of of British chef Gabriel Lightfoot and his various relationships and entanglements, set against the backdrop of multicultural England. Gabriel's various trials and tribulations - ranging from the death of a Ukrainian porter in the basement of his kitchen, to his father's failing health, to an unstable deal to open his own restaurant - make for some uneasy reading at times, as he struggles to make sense of his past and present. You can't help but squirm for Gabe as he stumbles and wracks himself with doubt and guilt. Ali has a wonderful, effortless knack for character development, and has peopled the story with eccentric personalities. From Gabriel's difficult working class English father, to his lounge-singer girlfriend to the veritable United Nations of kitchen staff, Ali's characters are so well developed that the reader can "see" them. The story stayed with me for weeks after finishing it. Monica Ali has established herself as a truly gifted storyteller.

In her second novel "In the kitchen" Monica Ali creates a miniature "melting pot" in a kitchen of a hotel restaurant. Gabe Lightfoot , middle-aged, self-conscious and dreaming of his own restaurant, is the chef in the kitchen of London Imperial Hotel restaurant. One day, the body of one of the Ukrainian night porter, Yuri, is found in the cellar. Yuri is naked and his death is puzzling. When Lena, another porter who was missing, reappears, more questions appear... Gabe is curious, but he has the whole kitchen staff, catering events and his own personal life to manage. Things get only more and more complicated, when he has to decide how to proceed in his relationship with Charlie, a beautiful singer.

I liked the colorful pleiade of international characters. Ali is very good at creating a very realistic environment to show the cultural clashes and differences. The new wave of immigration to Great Britain reinforced the problems connected with illegal workers and the bad feelings of the British.

Gabe is caught in the middle between his staff and hotel management - both groups are composed of strong, strange individuals. He is between an anvil and a hammer, as we say in Eastern Europe; and he has to survive. Moreover, he wants to achieve his own goal, the only thing he considers a success as a chef - his own restaurant.
The book is funny at the moments, but sometimes very sad (Gabe's loneliness among all these people is particularly painful). There were some boring stretches, which made me put id down and pick up in a while. Overall, this novel tackles serious issues and although can appear light, gives the reader food for thought.

I think that "In the kitchen" was a good book, I subtract one star only because in was bored sometimes. I will now definitely be more eager to read "Brick Lane" - a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a long time.