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Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe

0 comments By Jonathan Lethem

For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »

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   Chronic City

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Linda Shelnutt, April 21, 2006 (view all comments by Linda Shelnutt)
Skinny-Boobed, Barren, Non-Cook Reigns In Culinary Cozy

Tamar Myers gleefully gets away with spoofing (in good taste) the Amish, Mennonite subcultures. I?m thinking those communities might proudly read this series, loving Magdalena Yoder's religious outrageousness and pokes at their shared background. Myers gives a delightful view of this culture's ability to bubble with fun just under the surface of what they believe to be necessary religious severity. Maybe everything needs a relief valve.

Misquoted idioms are the forte of Freni, Magdalena's cook, who is also a relative (according to Magdalena, most people in a small Mennonite community are related).

Instead of "taking a page out of their book," Freni suggest to Magdalena that "You should take a page out of their dictionary." The people referenced as having the right page/dictionary from which to take are an Amish family who have shunned a relative who has installed rubber tires on his buggy. It seems that in this case rubber tires are too much of a lazy luxury.

Might that be why Myers doesn't quite allow herself the gourmet luxury Diane Mott Davidson relishes religiously in her series, with Goldy Schulz catering at the helm? Maybe it's too sensual to watch a character wallowing in luscious details in a cooking process simultaneous to getting a clue.

Or, possibly everyone has a different little bit of heaven to take to earth.

The included recipes from the Pen Dutch were indeed GOOD. On page 23 of the paperback, "Bubble and Squeak? is featured, which is a gooey, flavor-lush, potato-pancake-thingy fried in bacon grease.

(I?ve never purchased the expensive phobia of cholesterol. My Italian grandmother cooked everything in bacon grease and ate all the current ?no nos.? She lived, actively, to 94 years old. Her second day in any hospital was the day she died, telling my Mom, ?I?m going to go to sleep tonight and not wake up, Margie.?)

This novel, an entertaining, gentle, and tasteful exposure of various levels of the Amish culture should remain not only a best-seller in the mass marketplace, it should receive kudos of the highest order as being a landmark offering within the annals of Cultural Conversations.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780451197559

Author:

Myers, Tamar

Publisher:

Signet

Location:

New York :

Subject:

Fiction

Subject:

Cookery

Subject:

Mystery & Detective - Series

Subject:

Detective and mystery stories

Subject:

Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths

Subject:

Women detectives

Subject:

Mystery fiction

Subject:

Women sleuths

Subject:

Pennsylvania

Subject:

Hotelkeepers

Subject:

Mennonites

Subject:

Pennsylvania dutch

Subject:

Yoder, Magdalena

Subject:

General Fiction

Edition Description:

Paperback

Series:

Pennsylvania Dutch Mysteries with Recipes (Paperback)

Series Volume:

v. 12, no. 2 (D)

Publication Date:

20000301

Binding:

Paperback

Grade Level:

General/trade

Language:

English

Pages:

272

Dimensions:

6.84x4.26x.80 in. .29 lbs.