Customer Reviews

True Confections: A Novel

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Katharine Weber unfurls a unique blend of sweetness and pleasure, rich and exotic, from the moment that her heroine Alice Tatnall steps into the Zip's Candy factory back in 1975. Thought of as the local Arson Girl, after setting fire to her friend Debbie Livingston's house, Alice's rancid and bitter piece of the past, becomes inexorably blended into the present. Even when the fire was an unpremeditated and freakish accident, Alice is desperate to escape her Arson Girl fate. Soon enough she's captivated by every aspect of this stirring, sugary world of Zip's Candies and the lively, exotic Ziplinksy family. inhaling the sugary, life-giving air with gratitude every morning and letting it "sweeten and soothe every corner of her scorched, empty self." But Alice is not only seduced all of the delicious Little Sammys, Tigermelts, and licorice Mumbo Jumbos with the burnt sugar and chocolate aroma, "that marvelous, ineffable ,just right aura of Zip's Candies." But she's also powerfully attracted to the dark and handsome and wisecracking Howard, the son of the Sam Ziplinsky, the company's owner.

Originally hired by Sam, Alice finds herself bucking the attentions of his wife, the condescending and irritable Frieda Ziplinsky, across the whirring, clanking, chugging, sugar-caked Zip's Candies factory floor. A lonely exile from her own sad family, Alice's journey is broad and intimate, as she retraces the flaky and non-standard Jewish marriage to Howard along with many family revelations. Her recollection of events plunges us into world where the label "Dat's Tasty!" cannot help but infer a simple, naive, underhanded racism. Alice also cannot avoid confrontation with Frieda, Sam's officious wife who can't keep her unbeautiful son away from this interloper into the family. Later on Alice must also contend with Howard's sister, Irine, her entire otiose connection to the business really only ever about her own status and prosperity where she has used her money over the years to fund a wide variety of "half-baked do-good, feel-good enterprises of the moment."

Weber blends Zip's Candies history into Alice's very real world, retooling the Ziplinsky family lore and the founder Eli Czaplinksy, a Hungarian Jew, and an orphan who arrived at sixteen with his older brother Morris at Ellis Island in 1920. Eli worked perpetually to keep in his dream of his beautiful sweet candies and the success and prosperity those candies bring moving forward while he left the third and youngest brother Julius left behind with cousins in Budapest. Julius, full of Czaplinsky motivation and determination, arrives in Madagascar, a Jewish exile from the war, and figuring the best claim to stake, uses his diamonds to build his own empire.

Central to this novel however, are Alice's thoughtful observations of the worldwide candy trade, with all of the Little Sammies, and Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos whizzing along the lines on their journey from raw ingredients to finished candies to wrapped products tightly packed into boxes for shipping. While parts of the novel get bogged down a bit by the ins and outs of the multi-national candy corporations, and their contractual history, True Confections is mostly a unique tale about human nature and how we resist genuine patterns and meanings. As Alice increasingly battles Howard's unwillingness, or constitutional inability to play the part of a grown up, we constantly are witness to particular form of arrogance that can afflict those who have had all their good fortune handed to them. All the while, the candy lines remain perpetually in motion, forever after, mixing and blending and forming and extruding a new ending flow of candy, the innovative vision of Eli Ziplinsky finally made real. Mike Leonard January 10.

"How sweet it is!" TRUE CONFECTIONS is as irresistible as a box of chocolates - the story is filled with greed, love, fun, lust and the incorrigible Alice Ziplinsky. She is not a true Ziplinsky not having been born into the family but married into it. Hired fresh out of Wilbur Cross High School to work on the Zip's Candies Factory floor, Alice diligently approached her tasks in the summer of 1975.

On her first day at work after five minutes she had just about mastered the art of "separating and straightening the Tigermelts" when Alice looked up and saw for the first time her future ex-husband, Howard Ziplinsky, son of the firm's founder, Sam, and his grumpy wife, Frieda. Founded in 1924 Zip's did well with
the manufacture of sweets, especially Little Sammies, so named because the elder Ziplinskys learned to speak English by reading Little Black Sambo.

However, success was not to last because a few bad decisions, such as the production of "Bereavemints," which had a deleterious effect on the mourners and led to lawsuits. Plus, Zip's was small and could be eaten alive by conglomerates and other hungry giants. Is it curtains for Zips?

But first some history - Alice (who inherited the majority of the company) has been through many years of psychoanalysis and now feels fully prepared to dissect and describe the family's ids and idiosyncracies in an effort to retain control of the business. That makes for an amazing story that includes the use of slaves on a cacao plantation and involvement with the Jewish mafia.

Weber fills her tale with a three generational history, smile provoking asides, and a blend of fact and fiction.

- Gail Cooke

Alice Tatnall, a repressed Protestant, walks into Zip's Candies for a job, and becomes the symbol of a hard-driving, smart businesswomen and candy aficionado. Young teen-age Alice has damaged her reputation and entrance into Middlebury College after wrongly pleading guilty to a fire. Her parents are cold and undemonstrative so she easily embraces the owner of Zip's Candies, Sam Ziplinsky. Sam, with some ulterior motives, reacts positively to Alice and she learns the business from top to bottom. She marries Sam's son, Howard (called Howdy) and works at earning her new Jewish heritage.

She wants to be converted into the perfect Jewish mother and wife but to no avail. Her mother-in-law, Frieda, the most comedic character in this novel, will not give Alice a chance. One of the best scenes is Frieda's chicken soup recipe that, of course, is not the real recipe and Alice's chicken soup is a bland failure. The novel is consumed with candy making and the reader learns how this small company manufacturers three profitable products: Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos and Tigermelts. In addition to chocolate and sugar, the other ingredients making an impact are anti-Semitism, child slave labor on plantations, immigration, family trusts and the sweat and hard work of the American small business.

Weber provides detailed scenes of candy making, business dynamics and since Alice is the narrator, we learn about it all from her perspective. Alice attempts to give us a fair-sided view of the family. She riles on her sister-in-law. Irene, who has never worked a day in her life, but will use the family money for her misguided causes and resents Alice her percentage of the Ziplinsky Family Trust. The background of the book is Alice's affidavit of how Sam Ziplinksy's will should be interpreted. And there lies the questions of who is telling the whole truth, or do we see things the way we want to see them. Alice has fought all odds, her cold parents, marred childhood, questionable marriage and constant obstacles of her husband's relatives and the business.

I thought Weber did a marvelous job but the beginning of the book was stronger than the end. She tied up some loose ends in the latter chapters, except the plot became somewhat laborious. But through all the travails, we know one thing, candy makes people happy.

It's almost impossible to resist gustatory metaphors in describing this lively tale of a family-run candy business, and one apt glycemic analogy might be mille feuilles (the French puff pastry composed of "a thousand leaves," or layers). But in fact this is not a sweet story, and I think a better food comparison would be an Indian biryani: a large, complex, subtly spiced, potentially messy entree that yields sometimes surprising ingredients (like cardamom pods and almonds) the deeper you dig.

Katharine Weber is an erudite but highly entertaining writer, who scatters bits of French, Latin and German (not to mention Malagasi--the language of Madagascar, as we learn) phrases through her otherwise earthy and mostly hilarious tale of four generations of the Ziplinksy family. The first-person narrator, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky (a.k.a. Arson Girl), has a WASP family of origin but when she marries into the Zip clan, she almost immediately absorbs the high-energy, combat-ready modus operandi of her new meshpocheh.

The compelling story is told in the form of an affidavit, and it is only one of Weber's literary achievements that she grips our attention without revealing, until near the end, the reason for the affidavit. But this is no dry document--it's a rollicking tale of fascinating family dynamics and some dysfunction, as well as an apparently fact-studded tutorial on candy manufacturing.

At the outset, we have no reason to believe that Alice is telling anything other than the truth, but gradually we realize that either she is changing over the years, or she has always been a somewhat unreliable and opinionated narrator. The issue of truth is at the core of the novel, and the reader is frequently challenged to sort it out from the embellishments. (The publisher and author claim the book is entirely fictional, but there are many tidbits of actual history here, particularly about mega-candymakers Hershey's and Mars.) To confound the reality question even further, Weber and her colleagues have established a delightful faux website (look on Google under the name of the book) that you would swear is genuine until you poke around a little. In fact, the story of Zip's candies so "truthy" (to use Stephen Colbert's useful term) that many readers have told Weber that they remember the Little Black Sambo-inspired sweets that make up (and "make up" is the operative phrase) the Zip's line: Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos and Tigermelts.

Safety warning: The last line of the long first chapter of this novel could make you roll off the bed.

A funny, edgy book. The narrator, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, is so perfectly off-kilter -- she's both sympathetic and disconcerting, often at the same time -- that she lends a slightly funhouse feeling to the story's telling. This dynastic epic of a candy-making family encompasses immigration, assimilation, success, failure, racism, inclusion, and everything you ever wanted to know about the candy business, all skillfully interwoven. And Alice's weird, funny, almost-perfectly-reasonable voice is the perfect medium. You pay attention, because Alice is the kind of narrator you want to keep an eye on, and in the process the story unwinds vividly. This is a smart novel, out of the ordinary and fun -- recommended whether you have a sweet tooth or not (although that's definitely an asset).

When I began this book, I wasn't sure I would enjoy it. But it has to be one of the most unique and clever books I have read in a long time. Alice is a conflicted narrator because we don't always like her, but we also can love her - in other words, she is a flawed human being dealing with some pretty remarkable events in her life. My advice is not to bring any expectations of a typical novel, but just enjoy the ride. Now that I am finished with the book, I miss Alice.

It seemed like an interesting idea, but it doesn't deliver as unfortunately it reads like a non-fiction novel which isn't true. So what's the point?
The "plot" revolves around a whiney bitter woman who married into a Jewish chocolate factory & upon divorce walks away along with her children with the controlling interest. Like Alice the characters are bland. Occasionally it's midly amusing but it's lacks plot & action. Obviously as this is a book about Jews there are references to the most over-publicised human rights disaster in history, yes I'm talking about WWII. Thankfully this book doesn't go on & on about it & also on the plus side it's easy to read.

As someone who worked for a candy industry publication, I think Katherine Weber has done a fine job -- if she were writing a long factual piece for The New Yorker, on how candy is manufactured and marketed, where it is produced, what the political ramifications are (child labor of cacao, etc.) and how small manufacturers manage, sometimes with difficulty, in a market dominated by a few huge players (Mars, Hershey, Cadbury, etc.). I've always found the candy industry fascinating, and not just because I have a sweet tooth; based on my real-life experiences, Ms. Weber seems to be right on target wtih her histories (real and fictional) and the background on how candy gets to our lips, from the cocoa bean to the factory floor to the advertising and packaging.

The best part, by far, is the incredibly convincing description of Zips Candy; honestly after reading this, I can't quite believe that it doesn't exist or that I have not eaten it. I swear, from the author's description of everything from the factory smells to the retro packaging, that Zips is something I munched on out of my Halloween basket as a kid, along with stuff like Mary Janes and Charleston Chews, Cow Tails and Ring-a-Ding suckers. But it's all her (very convincing) invention.

So these aspects of the book are delightful, and thought provoking; in a culture of chest-beating health consciousness and weight consciousness, we still eat an astonishing amount of drugstore candy. And I love works of inventive fiction, where we are convinced of a product or invention, a comic book or a movie, that the author has created out of pure fiction.

But...but...there still must be a NOVEL, a narrative thread. Or, as I said first, this would be a fine piece for a non-fiction magazine article or a non-fiction book such as "The Orchid Thief", which so brilliantly brought to life for me the obscure hobby of orchid collecting. By choosing instead to make this a fiction novel, Ms. Weber required that she have an interesting protagonist with a story to tell beyond the tales of Tigermelt candy bars and Mumbo Jumbos.

On this level, the book fails. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky is a troubled young teenager, who has gotten off with a reprimand for arson, but who is "blackballed" by her small community, when she takes a job at the local candy factory. Shortly, she marries the owner's son, and is absorbed into not not the factory and their products, but an attempt to assimilate into their somewhat observant Jewish family.

I do not know if Ms. Weber is Jewish or not, but she writes about the Jewish experience in America (success in business, assimilation) awkwardly, with the feeling of an outsider who considers Jews "clannish". (As someone else here noted, she attributes anti-semitic comments to former President Bush, which I think are unsubstantiated, and this from me, no fan of Mr. Bush's.) Her mother-in-law is a one dimensional caricature of the "typical Jewish mother" -- controlling, bitchy, demanding.

Little happens in the course of Alice's rather uneventful life, beyond a divorce from her unfaithful husband. She eventually inherits a majority share of the company from her father-in-law, but all is not as it seems, as it appears Alice has "manipulated" this situation to get a share of a family company that she feels she "deserves" even though she is technically not an heir. Alice just doesn't come to life a a character; she has no real inner thoughts except about candy (who on earth thinks about ANY product or consumer good 24/7?). She seems to have no hopes or dreams, no ambitions, and of course, she has no interest in the company's millions (she only owns one handbag, drives an ordinary car). Her life is devoid of sensuality, except for candy, and even her interest in her own children feels flat and without emotion.

In short, she's totally uninteresting. And though the candy industry backstory IS very interesting to me personally, even so, Ms. Weber goes into such detail about a subset of relatives who live in Madagascar that I ended up skimming sections. Good grief, even my own family isn't THAT interesting to me, that I need to know every detail about the most obscure relatives. Furthermore, most family candy businesses (and a surprising number still survive in a world of conglomerates) would NOT own their own overseas vanilla or cacao production facilities, but buy ingredients on the market. I don't know where she intended to go with this; it's boring.

I am also surprised that the relatively smart Ziplinsky family didn't glom onto Alice's deception a little earlier.

In short, I think Ms. Weber choose the wrong literary format to present her research (which is very good, especially the parts about candy industry trade shows, which is dead accurate). This is the source material for a rather good non-fiction book or long article, as I said up front. As a novel, it is third or even fourth rate, with flat unimaginative & unsympathetic characters and lackluster plotting, and no clear resolution.

There is a fake website for Zip's Candies that is hilarious --[...]-- that must have taken a good deal of work (and money) to produce to support the author's website for the novel. It's worth a peek, even if you do not read the novel. However, I have some misgivings about this sort of marketing; imagine Gone With The Wind with a fake Civil War website including the characters or a Great Gatsby website, perhaps with fake bootlegging videos. It's too much somehow -- like a publicity stunt, or perhaps, like someone trying to make up for a novel's lack of depth and characterization with buzz and hype and humor.

The title of Katharine Weber's TRUE CONFECTIONS describes exactly what she has concocted--something sweet, salty, tart, and full of nuts. I laughed out loud many times, but I was also fascinated and moved by the narrator, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, an outsider always looking in. Does she believe the story she tells? Does she know when she's fabricating and when she's not? I didn't care. Somewhere beneath her defensiveness and distortions I glimpsed a big, hurt heart that made sense of it all.

You don't have to be a candy lover to fall for this tale spun by Alice Ziplinsky as she recounts her version of the family history behind Zip's Candies. I loved Alice's distinctive perspective, at once authoritative (particularly when talking about the candy business)and deliciously self-serving. It's a fabulous family saga played out against an unusual background--a smart, engrossing read.