Stanley Park: A Novel [Paperback]

Timothy Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2003

A love story wrapped in a murder mystery.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Timothy Taylor's debut novel Stanley Park, aspiring food artiste Jeremy Papier attempts to juggle the finances of his fledgling eatery, The Monkey's Paw, and his conflicted feelings about his attractive sous-chef. Meanwhile, on the other side of downtown Vancouver, his anthropologist father camps out in Stanley Park to study a group of homeless men. Impending financial ruin drives Jeremy into the clutches of an evil coffee magnate while his father delves deeper into the indigent lifestyle, probing the mystery of two dead children once found in the park as well as his failed marriage to Jeremy's mother. A tragicomic denouement takes the characters back to their human roots as hunter-gatherers in the 21st century.

The big idea in Stanley Park is that global corporate culture threatens the local connections that sustain us. Only the outcasts in Stanley Park retain these connections, and one of them imparts to Jeremy the secret of trapping a swan: "'Stinky box does it,' Caruzo informed, scratching himself. 'Stinky box is all.'" He retrieves a discarded hot dog shipping box and explains the technique: "'I distract him.' Caruzo said. 'You kill him. Distract. Kill.'" Though our hero cannot bring himself to dispatch the bird, he understands the basic link with nature. Stanley Park isn't Crime and Punishment and doesn't pretend to be, even if the vocabulary is sometimes a little pretentious. Taylor, who won Canada's 2000 Journey Prize for his short fiction, tells a good story, creating plausible characters for this coming-of-age narrative and making a good start to a novelistic career. --Robyn Gillam, Amazon.ca --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

What's local in a world that is becoming one global monoculture? That's the question confronting Jeremy Papier, the Vancouver chef at the center of Taylor's comic debut novel. Jeremy divides chefs into two types: the transnational Crips, who mix, say, Chilean farm-bred salmon and kimchi, without compunction; and Bloods, who are purists, stubbornly local in their food choices. Along with his friend Jules Capelli, another Blood, Jeremy runs the Monkey's Paw Bistro, making meals from mostly local ingredients for local foodies. Storm clouds lie on the horizon, however. Jeremy is deep in debt. To get by, he scams some $2,000 with the aid of Benny, a customer-turned-girlfriend. The scam backfires, and Jeremy has to turn to Dante Beale, an old family friend and the owner of a national chain of coffee houses, for money. Dante redesigns the bistro, turning it into a potential Crip palace. Jules is fired. Jeremy, under contract, remains. Turning for solace to his father, an anthropologist whose major project is living with the homeless in Stanley Park, Jeremy is reluctantly drawn into his father's work and the investigation of a decades-old mystery involving two children killed in the park. Along the way, he becomes fascinated by cooking for the homeless, and the joys of preparing squirrel, raccoon and starlings carry him into a glorious prank, which he plays at the opening of Beale's redesigned bistro. Taylor has written a sort of cook's version of the anti-WTO protests, striking a heartfelt and entertaining blow against conformity.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (September 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432902
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432908
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #233,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine dining from unexpected sources, June 30, 2002

By 

Stone Junction "The Suburban Hobo" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stanley Park (Hardcover)

Food is THE staple of life, the most primordial element of mankind's continuing survival. Without food, without sustenance, man withers and dies, empty and unsatisfied. Food is good, and everyone knows it. So why do we continually shovel it down our throats without a thought as to the preparation, the presentation, the simple TASTE of the substance? We need food, but we rarely give two thoughts as to its true importance in our lives.

Timothy Taylor has come to the same conclusion, that man has ignored the nobility of food and its prepartion for long enough. It's time to remind the common folk of what good food can be, an entire experience that can be savoured in one's mind for weeks on end. Taylor has risen to this challenge with admirable verve; his STANLEY PARK is a true feast for the mind.

STANLEY PARK (named after a famous park in Vancouver, British Columbia) follows the exploits of Jeremy Papier, chef par excellance. Unfortunately for Jeremy, what he has in talent, he lacks in financial acumen, and his restaurant (The Monkey's Paw) is continually on the verge of complete collapse. Jeremy is a Blood; that is, a chef respectful of local culinary traditions and customs, using only local produce for his meals. He finds it increasingly difficult to match wits with the Crips, chefs who consider themselves artists first and foremost, creating unusual meals though unorthodox combinations of foods (eg., Prawns with Spiced Yam Wafers, Grappa and Thai Ginger Cream). In a culture where being hip is being odd, Jeremy is all the odder for sticking to his Blood guns. Add to the mix an increasing pressure by famous coffee businessman Dante (owner of Dante's Inferno coffeehouses, a thinly veiled attack on Starbucks)to purchase Jeremy's talent and restaurant, and a father who has taken to living in Stanley Park to study the homeless, and Jeremy's life has taken on mythic proportions of personal angst.

Aas may be expected, Taylor excels in his detailed descriptions of life within a restaurant; the highs, the lows, the dizzying speed of food preparation and service, the exhaustion of a day's work, the pleasure of creating something that will be destroyed within minutes. Taylor captures the focussed pressure of a busy restaurant that will be intimately familiar with anyone in the service industry, and possibly stupefying to anyone without previous experience. The amount of talent and work that can go into every meal is rendered with perfect prose; Taylor's descriptions of food rank among the best, alongside Laura Esquivel's LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE and a particularly vivid passage from Richard Condon's PRIZZI'S HONOUR that still haunts this reviewer years later. And Jeremy's efforts to avoid the collapse of his dream are on par with the desperate real-life efforts to stave off bankruptcy in Johnathan Harr's A CIVIL ACTION, but far funnier.

Taylor also nicely captures Jeremy's anxiety of 'selling out' to Dante; as an antidote, he begins to hang out with his father every night in the park, preparing meals for the homeless from whatever materials are readily available in a large park (use your imagination). Jeremy's ultimate success, combining these two diverse factions of his life, leads to a final act of culinary greatness that is all the more appealing for its rather unusual menu.

Taylor, however, falters in a subplot concerning the past disappearance of two children in Stanley Park many decades previous. While Jeremy's father becomes infatuated with the rmyth that has grown around the children, Taylor's final meaning concerning this subplot remains ambiguous at best. It is an interesting story, but it jars the reader away for the main plot, and never firmly gels as a complete element of the story.

Otherwise, STANLEY PARK is a joy to read, a wondrous creation almost equal to the meals Jeremy creates. The fact that the mouth waters at Taylor's descriptions of Jeremy's feasts is proof enough of his talent as a writer. Luckily, Taylor can also pull off an interesting plot with remarkable characterizations as well.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Typical Gourmet Mystery Cannery-Row Romance, August 7, 2003

By 

Jorge Cruz Rodríguez (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stanley Park (Hardcover)

This is an odd book, at once intriguing and annoying. I'll
focus on texture and style, rather than plot, which other
reviewers have adequately misdescribed. The major character and
primary theme is cooking as profession and art. This thread is
developed with extraordinary realism and, probably, accuracy, to
the point where I became rather bored with it -- gourmet dining
is not my thing, much less the exacting procedures which lie
behind it. However, someone who is interested in it will
probably be entranced.

Concurrent with this thread is another, that of the major
character's father, who is a sociologist who, as research
toward his next book, goes to live in Stanley Park with the
homeless. The homeless are shamelessly romanticized,
Thomas-Hart-Benton, Cannery-Row folk style; one can hardly
open his toothless mouth without uttering eternal truths
cast in Symbolist poetry, and they all live happily in the
underbrush by trapping sparrows and raccoons. Maybe it is
my warped personality, but having been among and of the poor
much more than I would have chosen, I find that sort of
fantasizing about them very annoying.

Yet another strand involves a businessman who appears
to represent global capitalism; in this strand, the major and
other characters are not represented either realistically or
romantically, but rather in the flashy, baroque, post-post
style of with-it magazines and web sites. And yet further
back there's a strand of honest yet exalted Burgundian
cookery, love, and hiking in a '30s-novel sort of France.

When these varous strands impinge on one another, either
as a natural development of their own internal logic or
because the author feels it's time to screw them together
and give the book some semblance of coherence, the effect
is sometimes patently artifical and labored, sometimes
very clever, sometimes both at once, as when the hero chef, at
the novel's climax, causes dozens of very expensive guests of
the global capitalist (now his boss) to ingest raccoon obtained
from his father's homeless friends. Despite the grinding of
the works, some humorous moments are obtained, as when the hero
explains to a superhip reporter lady that his restaurant is
"beyond international. Beyond globalized. ... We belong to
no cuisine, to no people, to no culinary morality. We belong
only to those who can can reach us and understand us and afford
us. Gerriamo's is post-national.... Post-national Groove
Food." It's too bad these moments aren't a bit more frequent
and a bit more savage. Our world cries out for another Georg
Grosz.

As with some other authors, the characterizations of the lesser
actors are more vivid and memorable than those of the more
important ones. The hero in particular seems to lack particular
form. This isn't necessarily a defect; since most of the novel
takes place from his point of view, a certain ambiguity and
amorphousness may enable readers to imagine themselves into
his person more easily than if he were of a crustier sort.
(I don't mean to say he is passive -- he has many odd ideas
and is willing to act vigorously in pursuit of them. But
beyond cookery, there is no particular coherence or color
to them.)

Narratively, the story moves forward by fits and starts. Since
much of it is attuned to the hero's business success or lack of
it in the world of Vacouver restaurants, it has a certain
amount of formal movement which will probably be adequate for
those who demand a certain level of narrativity, that is, "a
good story". They may be annoyed at the other threads, which
don't go anywhere very much except as they're dragged along
by the main action.

I guess in sum I'd have to say that I didn't like this
book very much. Perhaps its postmodern incoherence was too
much for it to carry. But I do hope the author will persist,
and I'll probably pick up his next effort with hope and
interest. I'll be clever here at the end and say next time
he might let the ingredients cook together longer and
figure each other out.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rootless in Vancouver, June 30, 2002

By 

M. Benet "bookwise" (Greenbrae, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stanley Park (Hardcover)

A way to a reader's heart, according to this novel, is through the stomach. Using rather bland prose but obviously piquant analogies -- to make it easy on the brain, I suppose -- Taylor serves up the late twentieth century urban food scene as a multi-course meal for thought about where we are in our relation to where we happen to be living.

When we meet Chef Jeremy Papier, his world of cooks and kooks is neatly divided into Bloods, "who are respectful of tradition," and Crips, "who are critical and "post-national." Enter Dante Beal, another "foreigner" of sorts, who is the Devil incarnate, as identified by the young and sickly son of Jeremy's old friend. Dante has brought the rage of culinary post-nationalism to new highs -- or should we say lows -- with his chain of Inferno coffee shops ... and, yes, this is a not-so-subtle wink-wink at the proliferation of Starbucks in the Western world.

Love, sex, family ties, and other character-shaping aspects take a minor flavoring role in this novel in which battles are fought not with wits or sabers but faddish chef's knives and subterfuge is squirreled -- literally....

The real protagonist of this novel is an idea that tries to reclaim the "local" from the many ways it has been hijacked by multiculturalism, globalization, post-nationalism, post-modernism, and other post-isms. Blood is where it's at in the kitchen. It is blood that sanctifies place, the novel implies.

The Crip cooks have drained their fusion dishes of the power of blood when they went borrowing isolated ingredients of local foods from here and there. Their notion of place is nothing more than the pride of self, or so the novel implies. Though their intentions may be good ... well, you know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Which brings us Taylor's reinterpretation of Dante's Inferno reduced, like a fine sauce, to the notion of the globalization of food experience with no place or no self, however fused, in mind ... only expansion. And if you recall the original Dante's Inferno, you will surely remember that the worst place in hell was reserved for those who betrayed their country, who sinned against place....

I have to hand it to Taylor: he has certainly cooked up a plot that is sure to please different philosophical appetites. His quest for the binding power of the local reminds me of my own struggles around this issue.

I was once a transplant in Vancouver myself (as the author seem to be), and this novel captured for me something of the feel of that city that I could never quite articulate back then: the great divide between people's quiet desperation and their utter lack of awareness of the roots of their psychic anemia.