I made a cake. The recipe was simple enough. A dressed-up version of a pre-packaged mix, its secret ingredient was the addition of another boxed dessert: pistachio-flavored instant pudding. Called “green cake” by its author, it was meant to be baked in a bundt pan and served with Cool Whip. I don’t have a bundt pan and I couldn’t find any Cool Whip (I didn’t look very hard), but I did hunt down the necessary pistachio-flavored instant pudding, of which I diligently (if skeptically) added two packages to the cake mix (“any yellow cake mix,” though “moist Duncan Hines” was recommended; I opted for the brand’s Classic White instead, since it was what I found at the store and it seemed like it would do the job for this particular recipe). I whisked it all together along with vegetable oil, a couple of eggs, a dollop of sour cream, and the recommended 3/4 of a bag of chocolate chips (“a whole bag burns”). The resulting mixture looked like melting mint chip ice cream, even if it smelled more like Play-Doh, which is to say: not unpleasant.
But, I had little illusion the cake would taste particularly good. That’s not a comment on the merit of boxed cake mix. It’s actually because, when I first received the recipe in a mass email sent out a couple of years ago, all I could think was: This is in bad taste. I’d thought that because any email with the subject line “The Future, Self Care … and Cake” is telling on itself, telling on its sender, relaying far more information than just a family recipe. What it’s saying is: You should not trust my taste. The “let them eat cake” jokes write themselves.
Still, I promised myself I’d make the cake someday. And that’s what I did. I made the cake for people who’d also been on the receiving end of the “green cake” email, people who have good taste.
Good taste might appear to be the kind of thing that can be faked, seeing as how most things can be faked and seeing as how there’s more access than ever into the minds — and closets and kitchens and bookshelves and playlists — of people with good taste. But good taste doesn’t work that way. The algorithm can only help so much.
This doesn’t mean that good taste exists in isolation, unreachable and unattainable for all but a select few. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite — good taste is accessible, but identifying it relies on context and curiosity. That’s the reason it can’t be hacked; that’s the reason why some people’s recommendations carry more weight than those of others, even if they’re recommending the exact same thing. Bad taste — really bad taste — is devoid of meaning. Bad taste just sits there, awkward and unwanted and easily forgotten. Bad taste gives you nothing to believe in, no faith that things can get better or that there’s still the possibility of beauty in the world. Bad taste is boring, and easy; it’s thoughtless, one of the worst possible things to be.
How was the green cake? I don’t know. Its texture was pretty gummy and there was a cloying aftertaste. It was hard to swallow. It was fine. It was terrible. I also made a key lime pie. It tasted good!
Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen (available here)
Nuns were somewhat omnipresent in my childhood, and while I wouldn’t say my interest in them has remained consistently strong, I do occasionally enjoy contemplating the pleasures that would come with a life that rejects the material world and in which I don’t have to pay rent. While it’s possible to get my (your?) nunnery fix by visiting the Cloisters or watching La Religieuse, the best way I’ve found to engage in all the things about Catholicism that I actually find appealing (i.e. the paradoxically thin line between profanity and piety, the rejection of sterile symbolism and embrace of the messily corporal, etc.) is to read this novel, each pellucid sentence as worthy of contemplation as a rosary bead. It’s the early-20th century in far-upstate New York, and Mariette is a teenage beauty who has left her stultifyingly bourgeois home to enter the convent where her older sister is the prioress. She immediately becomes an object of fascination — both contemptuous and adoring — for the other nuns, an obsession that only intensifies and spreads beyond the convent’s confines when Mariette develops stigmata. Hansen perfectly captures the exquisiteness of total surrender — tears “shiver like hot mercury”; blood “scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor” — and the banality of doubt, of a refusal to yield to the unknowable. Or, as a priest tells Mariette, humbled by what is happening to her body, “We don’t have to understand what God is doing for God to be able to do it.”
Portrait of an Unknown Lady, María Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead (available here)
“Reality is perhaps a thing too inherently ruinous for there to be any abiding certainty about it.” Thus concludes our narrator’s assessment of the possibility of authenticity when describing another person’s life; a reminder that truth should also be spelled with a lower-case “t” and that what we consider to be true is usually just another “well-told story.” Of course, the only kind of person overly concerned about the contours of honesty is a liar. But, who cares? The value of truth, reality, and authenticity are all interrogated in this stunningly slippery novel, as Gainza eloquently probes the difference between art and artifice. It’s part detective story (who is the mysterious forger Renée?), part mad-cap caper (a crocodile under a bed?!), part history lesson (well, at least, it certainly sent me down a rabbit hole of finding out everything I could about the story behind Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa), Portrait of an Unknown Lady is wholly original, a quality which things both real and replicated can possess, so long as the creator knows what they are doing. And, with Gainza, readers are in the hands of a master.
An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, Kristin Keane (available here)
There are certain TV shows that have an outsized presence in my imagination, considering that I never watched them, and one of them is the Scott Bakula-starring, mid-’90s time travel drama Quantum Leap. The reason it even rattles around in my brain at all is because it was one of my parents’ shows, the kind they’d talk about recording on the VCR if they weren’t able to watch it live. I never really knew what it was about until reading Kristin Keane’s piercing memoir, in which Quantum Leap — as well as quantum physics, Roland Barthes, Home Depot, and Sigmund Freud — serves as a means of coming to terms with her mother’s death from cancer. Keane uses the framework of an encyclopedia to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the objects and ideas that make up a life; she makes clear how imbued these things still are with significance, after the life they were centered around has disappeared. Curating and rearranging the fragments of a person’s history to show a meaningful pattern is part of a long tradition of the grief-stricken, but what Keane does goes beyond making sense of the incomprehensible, she offers a glimpse at the fractal-like shape of not just a life, but of love. Even so, she knows that no matter what she writes, what she recounts, she will always be left with a void. She writes, “This missing: There is not a word to describe its choke.”
The Novelist, Jordan Castro (available here)
Bitingly funny, scatalogically exuberant, and featuring a simultaneous paean to and condemnation of the vaunted Chemex coffee maker (I love my Chemex and hate cleaning it in equal measures!!), Castro’s inhalable first novel manages to be both an uncanny reflection of our collective fragmented attention spans, and such a strong, cohesive narrative that I read it straight through without looking up from it more than once or twice (a rare and real achievement for me). An interrogation of the problems of social media, contemporary fiction (“This was what the literary world did now, I’d reminded myself, they celebrated stupid novels for stupid reasons.” lol), addiction, and, oh, just about all the things that might enter a writer’s head as they settle down in the morning, eager to put in a good couple of hours of work on their work-in-progress novel, The Novelist is incisive, sparing no worthwhile target, but it is never cruel, and while Castro jokes about many things and many people, he is never (well, rarely) completely dismissive of them. Rather, this glimpse into the life of an unnamed novelist, struggling to shut out the excess noise of his thoughts without unintentionally silencing what really matters, is a generous portrait of what it takes to be truly creative, rather than reactive or imitative. With The Novelist, Castro reveals the ways in which inspiration is never the single lightning bolt we wish it would be; it needs to be teased out and encouraged, given space to grow louder and louder, until we can’t ignore its buzz and brilliance.
But also…
“It felt politically important to me to view my own story or my own experiences as a case study for how even very self-reflective, critical people can end up being depoliticized, or limit their own freedom and limit their own choices and limit the discourse that they’re in.” I interviewed Elif Batuman about her wonderful new novel, Either/Or, for LitHub, and we spoke about rape culture, compulsory heterosexuality, and Martin Amis. (LiteraryHub)
“Unlike Belle, I do not want more than this provincial life. My feeling is, ‘This provincial life is the shit, and all I want to do is maintain it.’” I very much loved Isaac Fitzgerald’s meandering interview with Emily Gould (a person who has great taste and an excellent newsletter), in which they wind their way through parts of Brooklyn and discuss the lottery that is being a writer, the embarrassment of certain kinds of deaths, and the beauty of “a rotten banana, a pile of dog shit, and a used condom.” (Walk It Off)
“These are some of the most tender I’ve had, with a formidable thwack of vinegar. Open a tin of these and a bag of chips, and it’s a party.” That’s Anna Hezel, senior editor of Epicurious, recommending tinned mussels for the absolutely charming Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, a must-visit site for tinned fish lovers. Anna selected 10 different options, and I’ve now worked my way through each and every one of them and am planning on reordering soon. I’m a sucker for a formidable thwack of vinegar with my mussels, it seems. (Rainbow Tomatoes Garden)
One of the true delights (one of the only delights?) of social media these days is writer Mary HK Choi’s apple reviews on her Instagram Stories. She is unflinching in her assessments of these fruits (and also has started branching into non-apple reviews, which, exciting!), and has made me reevaluate my own apple consumption (a gift, actually), as well as give classic McIntosh apples another chance. Check them out and then go bite into a Pink Lady and see for yourself why it’s usually a 10/10. (Instagram/choitotheworld)