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Summary
Summary
Heralded as "a modern day Jane Austen" by USA Today , National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.
Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily's boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess's boyfriends, not so much--as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.
Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can't find what we're looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.
Author Notes
Allegra Goodman lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene-the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Goodman (Intuition, 2006, etc.) shows two sisters grappling with romantic, professional and moral quandaries at the height of the dotcom boom.In the fall of 1999, Emily and Jess meet in Berkeley to celebrate Jess's 23rd birthdaybelatedly, because 28-year-old Emily is ten days away from the IPO of her data-storage company. Flaky philosophy grad student Jess is more interested in the sexy leader of Save the Trees than in buying shares of stock whose price, her sister assures her, "will go through the roof." Across the continent in Cambridge, Mass., Emily's boyfriend Jonathan, whose own startup encrypts web transactions, is confident that "we're all going to be gazillionaires." George is already rich, a "Microsoft millionaire" who used his fat dividends to launch Yorick's Used and Rare Books, where Jess works part-time; he uneasily but longingly eyes his young employee, whose idealism challenges his middle-aged cynicism. Emily, though more practical than her sister, is also an idealist, horrified when one of her partners turns a data-monitoring program into an electronic surveillance system. When she makes the mistake of telling Jonathan about it, however, he's not so scrupulous. Meanwhile, Jess helps George snag an astonishing collection of rare cookbooks, and dotcom stocks soar, then plummet as the bubble bursts in 2001. The formidably skilled and intelligent Goodman juggles multiple points of view to chronicle her characters' intricate maneuvers for advantage and satisfaction; she even throws a pair of Bialystoker rabbis and some long-lost relations of Jess and Emily into the bustling plot. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny but always fundamentally serious, the novel takes a clear-eyed look at the competitive instinct and the profit motive as they clash with our equally strong need for love and connection. In the wake of 9/11 (whose aftermath is depicted with refreshing astringency), a wedding affirms the presence of joy without denying the reality of loss: "They held each other, although nothing stayed."A witty, warm and wise look at the human condition in the digital age.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Emily is the classy and astute CEO of a San Francisco digital start-up about to go public in late 1999. Her lover, Jonathan, is launching his own tech company in Cambridge, and questions of trust and ambition are complicating marriage plans. Jessamine, Emily's younger sister, is studying philosophy at Berkeley, volunteering with gutsy eco-activists determined to protect California's redwoods, and working in a rare and used bookstore owned by control freak George, an early Microsoft millionaire. Goodman captures the fizz and folly of the dot.com boom and bust with wit and perspicuity, and brilliantly contrasts the cerebral seductiveness of the cyber realm with such sensuous obsessions as George's gourmet cooking and Jess' consuming fascination with the collection of invaluable old cookbooks George acquires under peculiar circumstances. The cookbooks harbor clues to a romantic mystery Jess stubbornly investigates, while encounters with two ebullient Hasidic rabbis induce increasingly disenchanted Emily to search for the truth about her and Jess' late mother. From mysticism to algorithms, IPOs, and endangered trees and souls, Goodman spins a glimmering tale, spiked with hilarious banter, of ardent individualists, imperiled love, and incandescent interpretations of the mutability and timelessness of the human condition.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Against the backdrop of the dot-com bubble, Allegra Goodman imagines the lives and conflicting worldviews of two sisters. ALLEGRA GOODMAN'S new novel has so many appealing ingredients. Where, then, to start the list? Perhaps, as with food labels, it would be best to begin with the biggest: an irresistible story. Then add four strong characters: two sisters, and the two men who orbit them. Then there's the narrative voice: sweet but not cloyingly so, nourishing but not heavy, serving up zesty nuggets of truth. And the spicing is piquant but not too assertive, thanks to memorable appearances by (among others) a Bialystok rabbi, a bookshop called Yorick's, a collection of letters from a long-dead mother and a tribe of tree-huggers. "The Cookbook Collector" might seem an old-fashioned concoction, with its obvious echoes of "Sense and Sensibility," Jane Austen's first published novel, which came out in 1811, its author listed simply as "A Lady." But although Austen's narrative forms the spine of Goodman's book - with two sisters of different emotional persuasions, wrong and right men, the seductiveness of real estate - this thoroughly modern story takes place at the brink of 9/11, in a world where old-school hackers have given way to a new generation of money-lusting geeks who draw venture capitalists like flies to honey. One of these sisters goes to M.I.T. to learn about life; the other reads Hume to understand human nature. Jessamine Bach, a heedless romantic, is 23 and a graduate student in philosophy; her older sister, Emily, is carefully analytic. At the tender age of 28, Emily, the M.I.T. graduate, is the chief executive of Veritech, a start-up company built around (appropriately enough) a "new paradigm for large-scale data storage and retrieval." She is, paradoxically, old-fashioned in her private life; in the midst of an insanely paced initial public offering, she finds herself yearning for marriage, a couple of children and the scent of fresh-baked muffins wafting through the house. Even while she's getting one company up and running, she's pursuing a new scheme for a password authentication system. And yet, in spite of her deliberate nature, she's unable to verify the integrity of the man to whom she's engaged. He turns out to be a self-serving cad, the sort of person who thinks that lies are "only futures waiting to come true." There's nothing patient about Jess, the sister who rushes headlong into love affairs that are half-baked at best. In fact, one of her roommates accuses her of attracting fanatics. But Jess is also the sort of woman who wanders into magical encounters. One of them takes place in a dim and dusty bookshop owned by a first-generation Microsoft millionaire. At the age of 39, George Friedman has "not aged gracefully." An eccentric, independent, rumpled, slightly paranoid, antisocial, competitive book dealer, he is unmarried, "although not for lack of trying. Admittedly, all the trying had been on the part of his girlfriends." George is predigital in his affinities, an excellent cook and a wine snob. He's also disappointed, fearful, handsome and grumpy, "hard to please, and difficult to surprise." In short, a dreamboat. Jess has a vivid, if somewhat refined, imagination. She accuses Emily of being a throwback to the 19th century, then corrects herself: "No. Eighteenth. You can be 18th," she insists. "I'll be 19th . . . early-19th century." I suppose some sisters really do talk like this - the ones who majored in English, anyway. If it feels heavy-handed, here's fair warning: In addition to Jane Austen, you'll be bumping into references to "Tristram Shandy," Berkeley (the philosopher and the city), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Chopin, David Hume and Henry James. And that's just in the first 20 pages. This is shorthand for a value system that cherishes literature and learning - as well as cozy corners with comfortable sofas, the better for reading and pondering. George's house in the Berkeley hills, designed by the prominent Arts and Crafts architect Bernard Maybeck, is just this sort of lair. George is fiercely proud of the meticulous restoration he has bestowed upon his home, lavishing money on every detail, down to the door hinges. He has fashioned a jewel-like - and treasured - retreat. His "great beamed living room glowed blood-red and deepest green and glinting gold." Showcased throughout are carefully framed antique maps, shelves full of first editions of poetry, platoons of typewriters. "George told his life history with objects," Goodman explains. I was ready to move in as soon as we crossed the threshold. As in the novel by "A Lady," we can only wonder why it takes so long for the obvious to happen. For his part, although he has "established bulwarks of skepticism against disappointment," George is consumed with yearning. "How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end." The plot thickens when Jess meets a rabbi who lends her the money she needs to take advantage of a Friends and Family offering of shares in her sister's company. Rabbi Helfgott (whose name handily translates as "With the Help of God") loves computers almost as much as he loves the Torah; he created the first Bialystok Web page. Jess invests in Veritech, and the rabbi invests in her, with life-altering consequences. Rabbis are a good device for the unearthing of family secrets. Helfgott, who represents the magical interconnectedness in human relations, shares Jess's interest in abstractions: "Ah, the biggest question in Jewish philosophy is very simple: When?" It is, of course, a Messianic issue, but the question shadows every dimension of Goodman's novel. When will we meet our death? When will love come? When will we be betrayed? When will we find happiness? And when will we recognize the value of what we already have? A cache of cookbooks becomes the bonding medium for Jess and George. A mysterious, ashen-faced, gray-eyed woman with long gray hair - a veritable shade - arrives at the shop one day with a request that George inspect a collection of 873 cookbooks left to her by her uncle, a lichenologist. She had promised the old man she wouldn't sell his books, but she can't afford to honor that agreement. They've been stored in his kitchen: every cabinet and shelf, even the oven, is stuffed with ancient, valuable cookbooks. Clippings, drawings and notes, held with rusting paper clips, are jammed into their pages. George asks Jess to help him catalog and appraise the collection, but what he really wants is to cook for her, nourish her, feed her. Clearing the table after an elaborate dinner with his friends, George slips into a sensual fantasy of abundance. He imagines serving Jess succulent clementines, pears, strawberries, figs. He sees himself poaching Dover sole for her, grilling spring lamb, roasting whole chickens with lemon slices under the skin. "That would be enough for him." To which I can only add: me too. Such are the pleasures of early-19th-century sensibilities - and the delicious company of English majors and book collectors. You know how the story ends, of course. But it's the journey that counts. We're always told there are recipes for disaster and recipes for happiness, but where exactly those recipes are to be found is anyone's guess. In cookbooks hidden in ovens? In parables hidden in novels? If you're hankering for a feast of love, let yourself fall under the spell of Allegra Goodman's abundantly delicious tale. You won't leave hungry. A 28-year-old C.E.O. finds herself yearning for marriage, children, the scent of muffins baking. Dominique Browning, the author of the memoir "Slow Love," writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.
Library Journal Review
Crisp, accomplished Emily Markowitz is CEO of a data-storage startup in late 1990s California. Her sister, Jessica, is a messy, passionate graduate student in philosophy who's involved with the charismatic leader of Tree Savers and works in a rare-books store owned by the older, slightly grumpy George. George got rich off of Microsoft and now follows his first love, and he's impressed when Jess manages something brilliant with a woman who wants but doesn't want to part with an astonishing cookbook collection. Frantically different, the sisters are still bound by memories of the mother they lost as children; Emily strains to persuade Jess to invest in her startup even as Jess strains to see what Emily sees in her fiance, go-getter Jonathan, who has his own startup back East. Meanwhile, their father, who appreciates techie overachiever Emily more than wise Jess, is strangely resistant to the Bialystokers moving in next door. Alas, 9/11 brings not just family tragedy but the revelation of some uncomfortable truths and a realignment of relationships. Verdict Do these folks sound like types? They absolutely are not. Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls) is remarkably successful in creating rich, engaging characters and a complex story of love and identity that reads like life itself. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.