The Cookbook Collector: Yummy Sensuality

The Cookbook Collector

By Allegra Goodman

Dial. 394 pp. $26

Intrepid Jane Austen fans may be forgiven for being a tad suspicious of Allegra Goodman’s latest novel The Cookbook Collector, lauded by critics as a love letter to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  I’ve struggled with the cottage industry that has sprung up around Austen’s works:  the purist in me rebels agains the idea of Elizabeth Bennett fighting zombies or of Mr. Darcy outed as a closet vampire.   I don’t want to know what happened after Darcy and Elizabeth perambulate into the sunset--and I maintain any attempt to replicate Austen’s devastatingly snarky tone is doomed to failure.  Thus, I regard any author heralded as the “new Jane Austen” with raised eyebrow.  However, it is with pleasant surprise that I found The Cookbook Collector to be much more than an attempt to ride the coattails of a great novelist.  Goodman presents a charming  portrait of a problematic yet loving relationship between two sisters:  Emily, the sensible computer wunderkind with a technology start-up worth millions, and Jess, the decidedly UN-sensible graduate student in philosophy.  While both sisters are involved in love relationships with predictably caddish men, it is their relationship with one another that makes for the most interesting reading.  

The novel fluctuates between Emily’s and Jess’s stories, as well as the stories of their respective lovers Jonathan and George.  While the men struggle with how to develop and maintain a genuine love relationship, the greatest love story in the novel is Jess’s “affair” with a collection of beautiful and rare cookbooks she has been hired by George to catalogue.  The original collector of the cookbooks covered the pages with luscious descriptions and provocative sketches of his Beloved, and as Jess becomes increasingly obsessed with the cookbooks and their owner, she grapples with the complexities of love relationships in her own life.  Goodman’s descriptions of food and food preparation are heady and sensuous, mirroring the developing sexual tension and release between Jess and George.  When Jess declares herself a vegetarian who will not eat meat, George leaves the juiciest of all peaches on his kitchen counter for Jess to eat privately--a stroke of deferred sexuality that symbolizes Jess’s complicated understanding of intimacy and trust.   Emily’s ability to create a trusting relationship with her partner also is compromised, and her failings are played out against the larger background of the technology boom-and-bust of the go-go 90s and the tragedy of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.   

Like Austen, Goodman explores how love can be our greatest salvation, but she simultaneously offers a contemporary nod that love can be nightmarish as well.  In the end, The Cookbook Collector is a traditional love story played out in a complicated modern world, and Goodman offers her readership a sophisticated and intellectually honest vision of love’s redemptive and healing powers.