The Cookbook Collector

Turn away long enough, and people think you have forgotten them entirely.  Show your displeasure, and first they hate you, and then they despair, and finally, scarcely acknowledging it to themselves, they miss you. Change the game again, to see if they follow. The best ones can. The smart ones always do.

- Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

I just finished Allegra Goodman’s reworking of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility and have to say that I quite enjoyed it.  But unlike Austen’s Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters Emily and Jessamine Bach are living on the brink of 9/11.  Emily is the CEO of a data-storage start-up in Silicon Valley and Jess is a tree-hugging vegan half-heartedly pursuing her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Berkeley.  Needless to say, they have opposite sensibilities.

Goodman’s use of free indirect discourse is stellar; she seamlessly moves between characters, exploring the thoughts of not only Jess and Emily but also of their lovers, family, and other more peripheral relationships.  We know about everyone in the sisters’ lives and everyone in those people’s lives — Goodman successfully creates a little universe, a web of interconnected roles than converge and diverge throughout the course of the novel.