Setting the Table: Yes, Please

Dara writes:

I gobbled up Setting the Table, the new book out from Harper Collins by successful New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer.

Meyer has done extraordinarily well in a notoriously difficult industry, yet when he opened his first restaurant, the classic Union Square Cafe, in downtown Manhattan in 1985, he was operating basically by instinct. Meyer reveals in his book that his ideas begin in questions. In the early 1980s, when he was a high-earning salesman for a company that sold anti-theft tags to retail outlets, his passion was food and the question firing that passion was: "who ever wrote the rule that stuffiness and pretension must accompany great food?"

Meyer had traveled to Italy many times as a tour guide for his father's travel agency, and he fell in love with the outstanding neighborhood trattoria he found there. He wanted Union Square to become a place that people returned to for the food but loved because of the service and warmth.

And return people did. Union Square Cafe became a hit, but Meyer reveals in the book that because his father gambled unwisely in expanding his various businesses--travel agencies, hotels--his son resisted going bigger. Gramercy Tavern, Meyer's second restaurant, didn't come to life until the 90s. But the success of Gramercy Tavern begat Eleven Madison Park and the Indian-themed Tabla, which in turn led to The Modern, at the Museum of Modern Art, the barbecue joint Blue Smoke, and the burger place Shake Shack.

I didn't necessarily associate creativity with hospitality, but Meyer cemented the link. He is brilliant when it comes to being nice. Take this illuminating story: a distraught woman walks into Tabla and lets the host know she's lost her cell phone and wallet in the taxi on the way to the restaurant. The host tells her no problem, of course he will extend her credit, but he goes one better; he tells Mr. Meyer, in the restaurant that day. A light bulb flicks on for Meyer: this woman will certainly make a story of her bad luck--why not turn her tale of woe into a tale of wonder about Tabla?

Meyer finds an intern and asks her to start calling the lady's cell phone, which she does until locating the taxi driver in the Bronx. The interns scurries uptown and returns to match dessert with the missing phone and wallet. Obviously the lady is overjoyed. For Meyer, the math was simple: round-trip taxi fare from downtown to the Bronx, $30; a free glowing publicity, priceless.

When Meyer began as a restaurateur, he flew by the seat of his pants. But as he became a CEO, he realized he'd have to put his hospitality philosophy into words. For him it went like this: your business is only as good as the people you hire to work with you. Meyer makes his employees a priority, even before his customers and investors. If his waiters aren't happy, they won't make his customers happy. Meyer made me see waiters differently. If I'm in a restaurant now and a waiter seems disgruntled, hard-pressed, bitter, I start to think about the environment in which he/she works. Suddenly I'm thinking, her bad mood isn't just about her, but a reflection on the management.

Business books are not typically my thing, and the embossed cover of the book makes Meyer seem more like Tony Robbins than Robert Stone. But Meyer is a very good writer. He minored in English and Creative Writing at Trinity College. And I recall that a eulogy, reprinted in an issue of The New Yorker, which he delivered at a memorial service for FSG founder Roger Straus, was the best thing I read that year after the death of that much-written about publisher.

Never Let Me Go: Not really an option

Dara writes:

Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, arrived on bookstore shelves in 2005, but landed in my apartment only a few weeks ago, since I'm too cheap to buy books in hardcover. I'm cautious and cheap; I want to hear what people I trust say about a book before I spring for it.

People I trust seemed to like this one, and I'd already read Remains of the Day, and like others, admired the novelist's ability to communicate with understatement and grace his characters' inner lives. While that novel involves some of the obvious horrors of Europe in the Nazi years, Ishiguro describes events with great subtlety. He is an intimate writer in an age of broadcasters.

Never Let Me Go revolves around three young people, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Kathy tells the tale of their coming of age from the vantage point of a 31-year old "carer." We don't learn what that word means until quite some time later, but we do learn that as children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy lived in a boarding school called Hailsham.

But this boarding school is not Exeter. A typical course of study doesn't constitute the curriculum. Rather, the kids paint, draw, and write, and then these works of art are collected to be placed in the school head's "gallery" for later use. The kids never receive exposure to the outside world. We never hear about parents; indeed, they don't seem to have any. The teachers are called "guardians," and the kids don't have last names. Ishiguro crafts a bizarro world that is both familiar and hauntingly strange.

As in Remains, Ishiguro uses the plights of Kathy and her friends to meditate on serious subject matter, which I don't want to give away. While I don't feel the subject to be completely fresh, I do admire Ishiguro's method of discussing it. He doesn't present a single lesson or rant; rather, he suggests we ponder these young peoples' lives when weighing in on the larger subject he addresses.

As vague as that last sentence of mine was, that is sometimes how vague Ishiguro's scenes are. Other than that the novel takes place in "England, late 1990s," we read no place or time markers. The absence of details makes it hard to get into the novel. I had trouble staying with the book when I first picked it up, and I had trouble picking it up each time I set it down. I feel I was able to finish it primarily because I have time on my hands right now, and I think it's a deficit in the book that one needs an abundance of leisure to become attached to it.

Then again, Ishiguro's never been a warm and cuddly writer. His style is formal and distant. Yet, the formality that was so revealing in Remains is obtrusive here. For instance, instead of just plunging into a scene, he has the narrator Kathy say, "And now I should tell you about when we did X," or, "Before I tell you about Y, I should tell you about X." This technique slows further an already glacial pace.

Ishiguro is interested in repressed characters, people who are unable to come to grips with their emotions when an event happens, and only years later can understand what they were feeling. He is interested in love deferred and lost souls. He uses quite an experimental mode in revealing these inner lives in Never Let Me Go, a book I ultimately respect more than I love.

Kafkaesque

Dara writes:

The ending of Philip Roth's masterpiece, The Plot Against America, gave me chills. It strongly reminded me of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which, in a matter-of-fact tone, Gregor Samsa charts his transformation into a giant bug. While in English Samsa becomes a cockroach, in the original German, he changes into a huge insect. The lack of specificity in this phrase highlights its horror. The change is inchoate, literally incomprehensible. Language is at its limits when depicting the transformation.

I was reminded of this descriptive technique of Kafka's when finishing The Plot. Roth wrote this book a few years back as a cautionary "what if" tale. What if, he imagined, anti-Semitic and wildly popular aviation hero Charles Lindbergh had become president during World War II? What would be the consequences for America's Jews and for the country itself? Through the eyes of a respectable, hard-working Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, Roth exposes a dangerous turn of events that feels all too real. Jews are fired, involuntarily relocated, and, as in the case of Walter Winchell, assassinated.

Our narrator is "Philip Roth" himself, aged 8 and 9. The traumas of the times visit him literally in his bedroom, in the form of his cousin Alvin, who is maimed fighting the Nazis, and his hapless and orphaned downstairs neighbor, Seldon Wishnow. Young Philip loathes Wishnow for his helplessness. When Roth's family is doomed to be relocated to Kentucky, Philip tries to intervene with a well-positioned relative, and inadvertantly gets Seldon and his mother relocated as well. I don't want to give away more, but suffice it to say that Philip's efforts to rid himself of his weaker doppelganger just bring the boy closer. At story's end, Roth writes that Seldon replaces the stump for which Philip cared when his cousin Alvin shared his room. Now, he writes, "the boy himself was the stump, and...I was the prosthesis."

What is a prosthesis? In Greek it means an addition. In medical terms, it is a replacement for a missing body part. But the truth is that, like "insect," "prosthesis" can mean many different things. While we can't pin it down, we knows it incites in us revulsion and disgust.

Can we give a Jewish reading of the word? In the context of Roth's book, Jews are a kind of prosthesis in American culture, an unwanted addition, something gruesome, something deeply resented, as by an amputee, even if inevitable.

My favorite Roth books were the early ones. Portnoy's Complaint expedited by a few years my maturation process, since I read it at a tender age. I've kind of avoided American Pastoral and The Human Stain, because they seemed too misanthropic. Like Kafka, Roth seems to live with a lot of fear. And yet he can channel his dread into art, which is more than some of us can claim.