Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Unbearable Chairness of Being

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
by Aimee Bender
2010, Doubleday


I first encountered Aimee Bender years ago - during my junior or senior year of college, when I was still under the delusion that I was a writer and purchased a copy of the Short Story Writer's Market. Largely a compendium of contacts, agents and publishing houses, the Writer's Market also features interviews with notable writers both of literary and traditional genre persuasion. The interview with Bender described her work as a variety of magical realism, a genre that (thanks to One Hundred Years of Solitude) was at the forefront of my interest at the time.

I ferreted a copy of her collection of short stories (still my format of choice) Willful Creatures away from my library and devoured it rather quickly. I began teaching shortly thereafter and her story from that collection entitled "Dearth", about a woman who unwillingly becomes mother to several anthropomorphized potatoes, became a staple of my classroom resources.

In that story, the woman spends her life craving intimacy but willfully avoiding it, afraid of the emotional entanglements that follow. She is counterintuitively drawn to the very intimacy she shies from and in one rather heartbreaking scene she eats one her potato children whole, voraciously consuming and simultaneously destroying her need for love.

The same heartbreaking inability to justify the pangs of desire and loneliness pervade Bender's new novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. I won't waste much space summarizing plot here, in part because there is so very little of it to summarize.

Rose Edelstein is a nine-year-old girl who discovers she has a heightened sense of taste that enables her to identify farms and factories with surprising geographic accuracy and to vicariously sense the emotions of animals and people involved in the process of cultivation, processing and cooking the food she eats.

Her reaction to homemade baked goods is particularly acute, as she discovers when she eats the titular birthday cake and is overcome by emotion: a debilitating emptiness and overwhelming need for fulfillment inextricably imbued by her mother in each bite of the cake.

From this simple but indelible concept, Bender elaborates on the emotional lives of Rose's family using Rose's gift as a means of extracting complicated themes from her compact, lovely narrative in much the same way Rose draws the messy emotions of a baker out of his cupcake.

While reading I could swiftly touch upon some of the simple albeit appealing themes that settle on the novel's surface (for example the writer's desire to capture the inner lives of others, or the forced intimacy of the nuclear family). The longer I've spent in reflection, though, the more I've found some of the more darkly inexplicable themes of this book have been steeping away in the back of my mind - the inevitable chasms of separation that persist despite the intimacy of the nuclear family, how these chasms seem all the wider for the existence of that intimacy, the often crushing, seemingly inevitable loneliness that this intimacy begets.

Rose's family has the skeletal structure of the classic nuclear family: educated but unambitious parents and two children. Moreover, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake does not stoop to muck around in the more cliched American Beautiful representation of the insidious shockingly unexpected underbelly of the suburban dream. That is to say, none of Rose's family is a particularly bad person nor has anyone suffered a major tragedy to account for what is unmistakably brokenness.

The revelation of this brokenness occurs when Rose first discovers her ability and she senses her mother's struggle to find an outlet for her passion and the emptiness that has filled her sense of purpose. With this discovery comes the knowledge that the world of people around here almost unanimously are incapable of acknowledging or confronting their feelings. The layers of emotion Rose can sense in each bite of homemade food betrays its chef - often these emotions are not only go unexpressed but undetected by those with whom Rose interacts.

The worst offenders by far are her family. Each Edelstein is impossibly closed off from one another, incapable of communicating or truly connecting despite their otherwise close relationships. They all avoid the possibility of connection with one another despite the obvious toll this takes on their emotional well being. Even their long-distance grandmother refuses to meet her family, sending inscrutable boxes of possessions and instructing Rose firmly on the phone that she cannot love her grandmother, as they've never met. This woman eventually dies as much of a stranger as she was at the beginning of the narrative.

It is unsurprising, then, Bender renders as her main character a young girl afflicted with a surfeit of emotion; it is as though Rose is condemned to experience not only her pain but the cumulative pain of all of those around her, incapable of coming to terms with their own emotion.

Rose's brother, who seems almost autistic, is the worst offender when it comes to engaging in the world. He retreats to his room, where he spends hours on end alone. He does not converse at the dinner table, preferring instead to read science texts and the nutritional facts off of cereal boxes. He does not seem to be stricken with the generic distaste of immediate family so common amongst his age group; it appears that he simply would prefer not to interact with the world.

Rose's relationship with her father puzzles over the nature of the nuclear family. When watching television with her father, Rose reflects, "It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand."

Bender is clearly not suggesting their relationship is empty or harmful, but seems instead to be touching on the idea of how the idea of familial roles - mother, father, black sheep, younger sister, middle child - interferes with the ability to truly share ourselves. The desire to make ourselves into something normal means adopting these convenient roles and playing our parts until we become surprised to find ourselves acting instead of interacting.

The nuclear family is an idea - an enduring, comforting one - and one can find solace in adopting a requisite role in that idea. Over time, the burden of carrying these roles chafe us and we realize how unfulfilling this role can be. Conveniently, society offers another solution: the deeper connection you have been desiring can be found in romantic and sexual love.

Indeed, this solution presents itself to Rose in the form of her brother's kind friend George, who understands her condition and takes her more seriously than anyone else. But Bender debunks this myth (gently, always gently) when George grows older and distant and finds his own conventional love. Rose is left to make sense of the world on her own; Bender deprives her of the social safety nets of family and marriage and, without them, Rose is left to seek complicated answers to her uneasy questions about why she is surrounded by so much unhappiness.

This unhappiness manifests itself as a singular fear of engaging fully in life. Rose's father, for example, avoids hospitals because he is feels drawn to them. Rose, understandably, tries to convince her father to enter one in the hopes he has a skill like hers that could save people. Still, he refuses. Rose's mother, she of the empty longing-filled baked goods, eventually decides not to confront her messy love for her husband and instead picks up a convenient affair that fulfills her in a simple, unmessy manner.

In one of the more curious turns in the book, Rose's brother begins disappearing for hours on end and eventually she discovers that he has been methodically turning himself into a chair. At first this plot point seems a bit too fantastical, even after the reader all too happily suspends disbelief for Bender's work.

Eventually, though, the chair business becomes the emotional linchpin of the novel. Rose's brother is so incapable of enduring the burden of life that he prefers to become insensate to extricate himself from the obligation of love. Rose speculates that her brother was similarly gifted but that his gift was not as finite as meals and required the transition to senselessness to find peace.

Clearly, the brother is a foil for Rose, who (unlike her whole family) is not afraid of engaging in life; she gives herself to emotion and, uncomfortable though it may be, is possessed by the emotions of others. Rose nobly accepts the burden of vicarious adopting the emotions her family proves incapable of addressing.

This is not an easy choice for Rose. Like the woman in "Dearth", madly consuming her potato baby in an effort to destroy it and to make it wholly a part of her, Rose's gift is (like empathy itself) a curse as well as a blessing.

Early in the book, Rose laments, "I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time." In this, Bender seems to encapsulate the perfect madness of living, as perfectly plausible an alternate title as the Kundera Bender seems to have lifted from.

2 comments:

  1. I was shocked to realize while reading this that I haven't read any Amy Bender, at all. I need to get on top of that, although I'm finding it difficult based on how depressing you make her sound.

    What I feel odd about Lemon Cake is that, from how you describe it, it feels like a short story. I'm wondering what it is about this story that sets it aside from the rest of her stories.

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  2. It is not a delusion. You are a writer and if I hear you say that again you will be in trouble. You ARE a writer and an excellent one at that!

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