The Cookbook Collector: A Novel [Hardcover]

Allegra Goodman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 6, 2010

Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Allegra Goodman on The Cookbook Collector

Allegra Goodman’s novels include Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When I began my first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, the writers I admired most were Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. These novelists managed to write brilliantly about character and also about community. What I loved about these artists then and now is the way they interleave points of view to explore human relations in all their complexity. Love, hate, self deception, hope, jealousy, ambition, admiration--so many feelings play themselves out in 19th-century plots. Of course, each of these iconic authors has a unique style. Imagine these three as Old Master painters. Dickens is Bruegel with his lively, detailed gatherings. Eliot is Rembrandt, illuminating her characters from within. Austen is Vermeer with her exquisite control, her limpid intelligence, and her fine wit.

To have a relationship with the past means to give and take, to enter a conversation with those who came before you, but also to maintain a dialog with the writers and readers who live now. Therefore, with each book, I’ve developed new inspirations. Tolstoy inspired me when I was writing The Cookbook Collector. I was fascinated by his use of dialog, his use of history as both subject and medium, his panoramic scope and his multiple points of view. The rhetoric of the dot-com era inspired me with its futuristic, almost messianic language. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro inspired me, because his work is so powerful and so subtle at the same time. And the language of early cookbooks inspired me. I began to meditate on the purpose of recipes for food, for potions, for poultices, for great occasions and ordinary meals. Studying early cookbooks in the Schlesinger Library, I began to meditate on the difference between cooking from a recipe and improvising in the kitchen. This becomes a central question for Emily and Jess, the sisters in The Cookbook Collector–should I seek out rules, or make up my own formula for how to live?

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene—the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet. (July)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385340850
• ISBN-13: 978-0385340854
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (158 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Brooklyn in 1967, but grew up in Honolulu where I got to run around barefoot. I lived in Hawaii until I flew back east for college. I attended Harvard, where I stepped in my first slush puddle. Now I have waterproof boots because I live in Cambridge, Mass, with my family. Don't get me started on the winters here, and the snow days! When I'm not writing, I spend most of my time driving my four kids around, reading, thinking about getting some exercise (I like to swim), wondering what we should have for dinner, and occasionally indulging in some therapeutic vacuuming. Oh, and I keep a blog of my thoughts on the writing process, the books I'm reading and the literary life. You can find me at www.allegragoodman.com or join me on Facebook.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 75 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Adding a few thoughts to the pile September 9, 2010

By AlexaD

Format:Hardcover

I don't write a lot of reviews but wanted to comment on this book. When I came to the review page and saw how thoroughly and how well both the good and the bad about the novel had already been covered, I wasn't sure I had much more to contribute. But maybe I'll add just a few thoughts/points.

I found the Goodman's writing style quite engaging, and lovely at times. And I got involved with the main characters --though some of them were not very likable, they were very human -- and cared about their stories.

I agree with those who have said she tried to cover too many characters and story arcs, and to pull together too many themes and ideas. There were many threads left hanging, and for some of those that were tied up in the denouement, we didn't learn enough about how things came to pass. It seems like there was enough going on here for more than one book. Some of the story lines and ideas worked together, and some felt out of place. Some were over-developed, and some under.

I also agree that some of the coincidences strained credulity, and felt unearned. Who doesn't know their mother's maiden name, for example? This detail comes up early in the book, and only someone who has never read a novel wouldn't figure out what is being set up. And as a Bay Area native, some inaccuracies really bugged me. On their date at Greens, George "had the fish?" Only if he brought it and cooked it himself. And polenta at this restaurant, chosen because Jess is a vegan, would be packed with butter and cheese -- vegetarian but not vegan. Maybe this seems like too small an issue to criticize, but much is made of Jess' veganism. The book is full of detail about Berkeley. And it's also, in part, about cookbooks, and about food and the meaning of food. How hard would it have been to research the menu of a world-famous vegetarian restaurant that is practically as San Francisco institution? That glaring error seemed terribly lazy on the part of the writer and the editors to me.

Nitpicking aside, I also want to comment on the criticism for bringing 9/11 into the plot. I have no problem with that at all -- in fact, I think it really had to happen. The dotcom boom and bust is the backdrop for the story, and that era and its effects on people is certainly worth attention. 9/11 was a pivotal event of the times, and everyone was deeply affected by it. It seems very natural that the characters would be.

I enjoyed this novel while reading it, but in the end didn't feel it lived up to its potential.

137 of 149 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid entertaining read that gets a lot of stuff just right including startups June 17, 2010

By Jessica Weissman

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Forget the Austen comparison. Nothing compares to Austen anyway, and it obscures the many real virtues of this broadly scoped novel.

Allegra Goodman has always mixed romance, work, and Jewishness in her novels and this one follows the pattern. She's got a contrasted pair of sisters who become more like one another as the novel goes on. She's got a beautifully drawn June-November romance (neither half quite qualifies as May or December). She's got a dead mother whose life conceals a mystery, and she's got a set of quick views of different types of Jewishness - including one rather unexpected type that I don't want to spoil for you by revealing here. Her picture of bookstore life in Berkeley is fun to read, too, and if you like to read about collectible books you'll get a bellyful - semipun intended.

Best of all, she gets the tech startup stuff right. Both of the startups she depicts are familiar to this veteran of two tech startups. Some of her programmers even talk like programmers, and she paints the startup highflyer response to technical crisis just right. And she avoids the pitfall of writing overly explicit dialog for her programmers, so she doesn't get that wrong. Good judgement on her part. Her Bay Area details are right. I don't know enough to judge her Boston details.

And she manages to include 9/11 without bathos. I hope we see more books that incorporate 9/11 without exploiting it or centering on it.

There ARE some faults here. A few characters get short shrift in the shifting romances. Goodman probably tries to do too many things in one novel. There are too many up to the minute brand and culture references for a novel that has a chance of surviving and being read after this decade or century is past. The political commune is not convincing. There are a couple of credulity-straining coincidences that you'll just have to accept and go on. Someone once said that a novel can stand one major and one minor coincidence, but I think this one overexploits its allowance. And I don't get the title, which seems to apply only to part of the book.

But there are also gems. Convincing scenes of delicate romantic approach, and the final scene is outstanding. The writing itself is mostly swift, knowing and delicate.

If you've enjoyed other Goodman books you'll like this one too. If you haven't read Goodman, this or the previous one (Intuition) are good places to start.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Annoying simulations, what a coincidence November 30, 2010

By Delmer Fehrs

Format:Hardcover

My entire career was in research and high-tech (though with semiconductors not software). This included time in the milieu of high-tech startup companies. Research, high-tech, and startups could provide fodder for some good novels. With "The Cookbook Collector" as with her previous novel, "Intuition", Allegra Goodman has NOT written these novels.

"Cookbook Collector" is peopled with off-the-shelf stereotypes--the ethical entrepreneur, the unethical entrepreneur, nerdy engineers, socially clueless engineers, dumb and unethical MBA's, the early retiree whose moderate eccentricity is funded from Microsoft-era stock-options, the responsible sister, the irresponsible sister, the dead mother with a hidden past, the Berkeley environmental nut-jobs with alley-cat morals, the all-wise and jolly rabbi with a heart-of-gold, etc., etc., etc. Generally, the characters seem plausible but not very real to me. They almost seem like a cast assembled for a video game or some other kind of simulation.

Likewise, the book has a number of settings which, to me, seem to be used somewhat for a certain name-dropping cachet, to further stereotype the characters, and to avoid building specific cases by again simulating. Berkeley, Palo Alto (and Silicon Valley), and Cambridge--shorthand for places with certain kinds of people. Similarly, the author drops a lot of "insy" details or names, often correctly, to plausibly simulate situations within and around the dotcom milieu.

Another annoyance is that major turning points revolve around cliche events or ridiculous coincidence. Two major characters,Emily and Jonathan, have dotcom startups in the late 1990's--foreshadowing as subtle as a sledgehammer. Following the dotcom meltdown, we get served 9/11 as a main plot event. (Does that sound to you like something that Jane Austen would have stooped to?) Finally, there are coincidences piled on top of coincidences ripe for an old-style MAD Magazine parody. Emily's "irresponsible" sister, Jess, meets up with the jolly, heart-of-gold, all-wise rabbi in Berkeley. The rabbi's wife's sister is married to another rabbi and lives on the East Coast--Sharon, Massachusetts to be precise. And, guess what, the remarried father of Emily and Jess also lives in Sharon, Massachusetts. Nuff said; earlier I carried this through to a spoiler. Sorry.

Thus far, I haven't even gotten around to the meaning of the title "The Cookbook Collector"--but that's another story. And there's the rub; the author tries to keep 4 or 5 stories going without doing a very good job on any one of them.