I spent most of Labor Day weekend on a dock on Lake George, leisurely making my way through Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press, $26.00). This novel is packed with rich detail and has something for everyone—well, for everyone who has an interest in the dot-com boom, rare books, environmentalism, Berkeley, or cooking, to name a few of the many topics that Goodman touches on here.A few moments—an inevitable but somewhat inappropriate love affair, personal disaster on 9/11, or Goodman's insistence on the beauty and delicacy of her protagonists, sisters named Jess and Emily—might make readers squeamish, but the book’s many pleasures are likely to leave a greater impression. If there’s one thing that Goodman clearly understands, it’s the relationship between passion and material objects. Appreciation for the finer things in life (an elegant house furnished in glowing wood, a perfectly ripe peach, the eponymous cookbook collection and its mysteries) is present throughout, as are the current events and trends of the 90’s and 00’s. These two foci, in fact, parallel the interests of Jess and Emily—the former a graduate student in philosophy, the latter a Silicon Valley CEO.
If you’ve been longing to escape into a beautifully realized material world or the distinctly more harrowing realm of technology and financial growth over the last twenty years, The Cookbook Collector is precisely the novel for you.
Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Borders • IndieBound • Dial Press
