Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, September 23) is 704 pages long, and what better way to draw the reader in than to start with the day’s menu? “The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day.” There will be kebabs for dinner, and the mutton is already marinating. Should they have cauliflower or spinach?
Ba and Dadaji are worried about their granddaughter, Sonia, who’s lonely in America, so they call her and learn that she’s eating Tomato Tigers, “which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.” She’s having “brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie” for dessert. “Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.”
Though Desai’s delightfully juicy novel isn’t about food, per se, it’s a perfect example of the way food can help create vivid characters and make the reader want to sit down at the table with them. Other recent books, though, put food right at the center of the action.
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle (Simon & Schuster, May 20): Kostya Duhovny is 10 when his father dies. A year later, he gets an odd taste in his mouth: pechonka, his dad’s favorite food. Even odder, he tastes the foods of other dead people. When his landlord tells him that his rent is going up but that he’s sorry, Kostya is furious until he starts to taste “delicate flakes of frozen limoncello, scraped with a fork, spooned into a hollowed-out rind—and [feels], without really knowing how, that the landlord was being sincere. That he really was sorry. That he’d lost someone once and remembered how it ached.” When he grows up, Kostya opens a restaurant that summons ghosts for grieving survivors—at a price. Our review says “Lavelle spins a twisty plot filled with mouthwatering descriptions of food and some very hungry ghosts.…a tasty variation on the supernatural thriller.”
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom, August 5): After a war has led California to secede from the U.S., four robots find that the San Francisco takeout spot where they’d been working has been abandoned by its owners, so they decide to reopen as the best noodle shop around—hoping no one will notice that what they’re doing is illegal. How do they figure out what tastes good to humans? “Preferences could be affected by seemingly irrelevant details like where the human had lived, who had fed them as a child, how much money they had, and even their psychological health.” Our starred review calls the book “both heartwarming and pointed.”
Cheesecake by Mark Kurlansky (Bloomsbury, July 15): Revolving around the Katz Brothers Greek Diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side from the 1970s through the ’90s, Kurlansky’s first novel (following many food-centric nonfiction books) is a colorful evocation of a food- and family-obsessed milieu. You’ll want to run out and try a piece of New York cheesecake when you’re finished; I recommend Junior’s.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
