Truffle Oil, Staff Rota, and Vegetable Prep: New Novel Takes You Into the Kitchen

In the Kitchen: A Novel

In the Kitchenis nowhere if not in the kitchen. In its first 100 pages there is so much detail about mise en place and truffle oil, staff rota and vegetable prep, consommé julienne and chiffonade, that we could be watching the Food Network. The author has done her research. The kitchen of the grand Imperial Hotel on Piccadilly is presented as “part prison, part lunatic asylum, part community hall.” It is also — and this is where Ali’s interests lie — an employer harbouring immigrants whose back-stories concern child armies in Africa, the Soviet Union’s senseless declassifying of intellectuals and the sex trafficking of teenage girls from Eastern Europe.

No doubt someone somewhere has already written a PhD thesis on the role of restaurants in the literature of immigration. In that genre, I prefer Ha Jin’s descriptions of the Chinese restaurant in A Free Lifeand Rose Tremaine’s striving Polish dishwasher in A Long Way Home. Ali’s Kitchen comes with a series of unsympathetic characters: The reader casts about from chef to his not-very-believable second-in-command, from fiancé to father, and finds nowhere to rest her affections. I would be the last to assert that we have to love all the characters in a novel. That is not what fiction is about. However, if an author deeply engages with any character, whether an upwardly mobile mid-life man from a Northern mill town or an earnest Asian immigrant chopping at his “battle station,” that character’s humanity will win our sympathy, if not our affection.

So the problem with In the Kitchenis not that the characters aren’t pleasant people, though they aren’t, but that they do not come alive. And why do they do not come alive in the hands of this gifted, insightful and thoughtful writer? I am afraid it is because they are stifled with dogma, with Ali’s desire to speak for everyone arriving on England’s shores. The immigrants are so loaded down with Ali’s voice that they can’t seem to speak with their own, even though they are given speech tics to signify their heritage. And the English are mouthpieces for Ali’s ideas about the country’s crisis of heart.

Ali wants to tell us what she thinks about the terrorist threat in London: “What are the chances? What kind of statistic are we talking about? But it invades us. We’ve been invaded, not by anyone, just by a nightmare.”

Read the rest of the review here, or get a copy of In the Kitchen now!

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