Aimee Bender is nothing if not a master of alluring premises. She’s made a name for herself as a virtuoso of “magical realism,” but this distinction doesn’t quite capture her real talent. Her ideas, the divergences from our own reality that are a hallmark of her work, are not always strictly magical. Sometimes they are simply odd or unusual; sometimes, in what I consider to be her best work, they are magical in a way that strikes her readers as something very much like plausible.
Here’s a good one: nine year-old girl discovers she can taste, yes, taste, the minds of the people who prepare her meal. That is, she can taste their emotions, their frustrations, their passions, their dreams, every drop in their torrent of thoughts as they grew, picked, processed, boxed, shipped, chopped, boiled, and served. Every bite she takes leaves her swimming in another person’s life. Just how far Bender takes the implications of this ability, the routines and games to which this girl must adhere just to survive a family dinner, and the ways in which it can radically alter her relationship to the known cook, I’ll leave for you to discover. Suffice to say that the detail with which this experience is weaved lends it an unlikely degree of authenticity.
But The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a great deal more than its premise. In fact, Rose Edelstein’s unique skill adds little more than—ahem—flavor to an otherwise (mostly) realistic family drama. I loved this novel not just for its fascinating hook, but for its compelling and lovable cast, its fantastic twists, and, most of all, for the gorgeous lyrical prose in which it’s offered. Bender is as evocative and as striking as ever here, not just in her ability to make clear the details of each scene, but to pick those details so meticulously, to place herself so completely in the mind of a child (and, later, a young woman), and to pick out the little pieces of the world that her age group most prizes.
This is what I treasure about her stories: not that she is offering me a different world, but that she is offering me the same world in a different manner, sometimes subtly, sometimes savagely. Every good writer does this, but Bender does it in a way that is much more literal, and often much more captivating. Her newest novel, far from being the exception to the rule, may be its new benchmark. It’s not as weird as some of her other work, granted, but it’s every bit as tragic and, finally, every bit as triumphant.
What begins as an unpleasant glimpse into a smiling mother’s private, internalized sobbing spirals into a complete family portrait, warm and wretched by turns. There’s other magic to be found before it’s all over, of course, but I’d encourage people to read it mostly for the characters and their relationships; because as is usually the case with Bender, the magic is there solely to serve those relationships. And be assured—it serves them very well.
