DISCOVERIES
Gertrude Bell
Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
Georgina Howell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 512 pp., $27.50
SHE was outspoken, self-confident, smart, brave. She took a first at Oxford in modern history, began mountain climbing in her 30s, spoke six languages, loved and lived in the world’s deserts and helped create an autonomous Iraq. And yet, and yet -- born in 1868 a child of the Victorian era, Gertrude Bell gave up her first love because of parental disapproval (he died of pneumonia a year later) and lost her second, a married man and her true soul mate, in Gallipoli after refusing to sleep with him (Bell was still a virgin in her 40s). Georgina Howell navigates the paradoxes of Bell’s personal life, including her oddly anti-suffrage views, with great understanding, historical intelligence and attention to context. Her descriptions of Bell’s lavish upbringing and fondness for beautiful clothes are delightful. But it is her respect for Bell’s knowledge of the Middle East, and for the role that Bell played as advisor to the male players in that arena, that rounds out this striking portrait.
**
Kitchen Con
Writing on the Restaurant Racket
Trevor White
Arcade: 230 pp., $25
IT takes one to know one. “People become restaurant critics in the hope that they can impress friends, influence strangers, and secure reservations at places where other people routinely contract salmonella.” That’s Trevor White, bad-boy Irish restaurant critic who thinks (aloud) like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (which hand that feeds me can I bite next?) and writes with an edge verging on vitriolic. Fortunately, his favorite targets are celebrity chefs, British publicists (or anyone British) and restaurant critics: “Critics -- even great critics -- are like very bad lovers.... They don’t care if you’re not ready, they leave without saying a word, and then they tell everyone what you did wrong.” Even the information in “Kitchen Con,” like the fact that 49% of every dollar spent on food in the U.S. is spent outside the home, or that the dead used to rot in three days and now take three weeks because of all the preservatives we eat, causes a certain amount of pain. Guidebooks (“The French are to blame”), the smarminess of the business, bad waiters, ego-crushingly beautiful waitresses and what life is like as a restaurant brat (White’s parents ran one in Dublin) all fall under his scornful scrutiny. Only Anthony Bourdain emerges unscathed. Why? Because White wants to be Bourdain when he grows up: “Tall. Handsome. Hip. Funny.... Looks like Jeff Goldblum, dresses like Harvey Keitel. You get the impression that he wants to be buried in black leather.”
**
The Ocean in the Closet
A Novel
Yuko Taniguchi
Coffee House Press: 252 pp., $14.95 paper
MANY scary things in this novel about a young Japanese girl named Helen, who has inherited the fears and weaknesses of her parents and grandparents, are rendered less scary by the end. Like the ghost of a dancer who killed herself centuries ago, or the closet Helen’s mother puts her in to punish her. On a trip to Japan to visit her Uncle Hideo, Helen learns that her mother, now hospitalized for depression, used to crawl into the closet for comfort when she was a girl. Helen’s mother looks out her hospital window at the ocean for comfort, the same ocean that victims at Hiroshima died running into to cool their burns. The fears of her forebears cause Helen much anxiety. She feels responsible for her little brother, for her mother’s illness and for her father’s sadness. There is a gentle, rhythmic lapping at the core of this quiet novel, a sense of time passing and the inevitable, painful dissipation of trauma over generations.
*