Striking out on one's own, figuring out who you are, gaining experience, learning discernment, acquiring a palate for life -- such is the substance of Sweetbitter, a debut novel by Stephanie Danler.
The narrator is so intent on the world that she sees that the reader doesn't even learn her name until nearly two-thirds of the way through the book. Her co-workers call her Flutter, Pop Tart, Skippy and the like. Tess is too busy telling us about the people she meets working at a long-established New York restaurant, the man and woman who capture her attention, imagination and libido, the long hours unwinding with drink and drugs after relentless hours on the job.
It was the last aspect that made me nearly give up on the book. I thought it was my age; I'm too old to be interested in a foolish young person drinking, doing drugs and falling for the wrong people.
But I remembered being young and not so smart myself, and I remembered the promise at the beginning of the novel, when characters appear to talk about food and wine, but are really talking about life. (And even though the novel is set in a restaurant and the characters all work there, and Danler worked at Union Square Cafe, this is not really a foodie novel with what we eat and drink featuring strongly. They are metaphors, not characters.) As I quoted in an earlier diary, these stood out:
Taste, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.
"The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That's the only way to learn anything -- you have to live with it."
Because of writing like this, I inferred there would be more to the novel than the usual young innocent goes to the big city, makes mistakes and feels better for having learned something of life. After all, it's true about both life and fiction that:
"We are creating the world as it should be. We don't have to pay any attention to how it is."
Tess is drawn to, and drawn by, Simone, an established server who calmly rules over the restaurant, who knows wine and poetry and also knows Jake, the bad-boy bartender. Tess yearns to be mentored by Simone and to become Jake's lover. Both things become true, even as she knows that the two have a relationship that goes beyond lovers and the restaurant. Even wondering what they saw in her, and whether they saw something together or singly, when this was the focus of the novel, I was not engaged.
But the things they talked about? Now, those were interesting. One day, Tess confronts Jake, who has taken her to a greasy diner that serves horrid food, for being patronized about her age (he's only about 30, but, still, when you're barely old enough to legally drink, that's world-weary). His answer to her nails what nostalgia for one's long-gone glory days can be like:
"You see, what those kids over there" -- he pointed at the empty booth -- "don't realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then -- poof -- it's gone. It's just nostalgia."
Even though there is nothing to tie this to an evening of my 20s, I was back there, that night, knowing it was part of a time that would pass and would never come my way again. That was the power of Danler's writing.
When the narrator, looking back at how it all fell apart, as these things must do, makes the following statement, again, I was there, back in those days, making my own mistakes:
You will see it coming. Not you actually because you don't see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don't take and trite warnings you can't hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.
When you're older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn't have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they're young. They don't remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.
When you can't see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.
About the only thing I quarrel with there is that I did know what it felt like then to be doing something for the incident, and I remember that feeling with a pang. It was true. It was real. Perhaps it was only a rite of passage. But it felt necessary then and is part of who I am now. Simone tells Tess:
"Aging is peculiar," she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. "I don't think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy -- when the books, clothes, bars, technology -- when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you're abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?"
"Aren't you in a new circle?"
"Of course. But that circle for a woman is tricky."
"Trick?"
"It's a circle of marriage, children, acquisitions, retirement funds. That's the culture you're asked to participate in. Now ... if you decline?"
"You're in your own circle," I said. It sounded lonely, but also fearless.
In my twenties, that's what I felt about being older. Now? It's more a combination of remembering those feelings, testing new experiences against those feelings, and feeling I've been given a gift to be able to have both then and now. It's not a matter of being fearless. It's more a matter of being in the moment, just like back then, but also being able to step back and see both then and now.
However, I do agree with something Tess flings at a man toward the end of the novel:
"You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present."
The future is not a consolation for the present. Even with the bad times -- and oh, how there have been those -- the present is a consolation for the past. I was there. Now I am here. I have both.
Some of these ideas came up right after finishing the novel, as these connections seem to happen more often these days, reading a piece in The New Yorker by Andrew Solomon from last year. In The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers, Solomon notes that those who are old were once young, but it's experience that cannot be transferred. This leads him to a conclusion about a larger idea:
Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls—and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that—the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes.
What I’d really like, in fact, is to be young and middle-aged, and perhaps even very old, all at the same time—and to be dark- and fair-skinned, deaf and hearing, gay and straight, male and female. I can’t do that in life, but I can do it in writing, and so can you. Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination’s curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.
But when does this become appropriation? It’s a line not often seen except in hindsight, and then usually by only by others.
Perhaps this ties in to the more important idea Solomon featured, and to which Danler may have been referring to. Like Solomon in his column, I defer to Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet:
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, or books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Whereas Solomon contends that: "The belief that questions are precious whether or not they have answers is the hallmark of a mature writer, not the naïve blessing of a beginner," Danler, in Sweetbitter, likes the questions even more than any answers.
He then ties it all in to why we write and why we read:
Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose.
Well, I'm working on that.