The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong
“The Remains of the Dinner.”
Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt leads us through a journey of memory via a fascinating narratorial choice: a gay male Vietnamese cook who works for lesbian power couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1930s Paris. The novel interweaves food with romance in a time outside of normal time.
Like a cake, the book adopts a layered approach. The main character (who his employers call “Thin Binh”) recounts the recipes of his life’s three love affairs: one in Vietnam, one on the boat from Vietnam to France, and one in Paris. At the same time, Binh wrestles with internalized toxic models of masculinity due to his contentious family dynamics. Each of the trusting chef’s affaires des cœurs ends in predictable heartbreak. Also, like many contemporary novels, Truong’s accounts follow his ruminations rather than chronology, often switching situations from one paragraph to the next. A resulting untethered quality works for the story, given Binh’s dreamy, reflective nature. All the same, please be aware that the book does not have much of a plot, per se.
An emerging novelist, Truong evinces flashes of brilliance: “I am a man whose voice is a harsh whisper in a city that favors song.” “Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys.” Exquisite stuff, the literary equivalent to foodgasms. The main character’s voice remains constant throughout, engendering our trust.
I particularly like Gertrude Stein as Binh’s unlikely employer (he calls her “GertrudeStein,” a delightful aperçu). Lesbian couples inhabited spaces of invisibility, and the imperious writer would seem a prime subject for fictionalization, a genius who hid her sexuality in plain sight. In my own performance history classes, we talk about “Boston Marriages”—two women who lived together, often mature, who never married, did not have children, slept in the same bed, yet the nature of their relationship seemed to escape observers. How did people who experienced same-sex desire build their self-concepts in a society that did not provide categories for them? Asian identities also inhabit a particular kind of invisibility as the “eternal outsider,” so a gay Vietnamese chef in a French-Indochine colonial setting observing GertudeStein would seem a brilliant setup.
In the end, though, I come away with the feeling that the story leaves money on the (dinner) table. Deviation from linear time, combined with traditional story structure, reduces the text to an extended interior monologue of pensées, a slog to get through after a while. As for the gustatory aspect of reading this book, we get a lot of food description in The Book of Salt, but I can’t seem to taste the words in a way that, say, food memoirist Ruth Reichl can evoke. Finally, as much as we hear a lot about GertrudeStein and Toklas, they do not propel the story. They seem more like table decorations than anything.
As a scribe, Truong emulates common writing tics—passive voice, doubling (they recounted and told stories and anecdotes as they flirted and laughed, that sort of thing), the extra cooking fat of adverbs, and persistent use of habit words (“suddenly,” “even,” “began/started to…”), as well as the idiosyncratic “well,” as in, the author uses well every few pages, because, well, she does.
Moreover, in reading a book about the servant class by a hyphenated Asian-identity author, I couldn’t stop thinking of the virtuosic Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Remains of the Day serves as sui generis of the service genre. Putting Truong’s writing in conversation with playwright David Henry Hwong (M. Butterfly, Miss Saigon, Yellowface) would prove an productive exericse as well. On the other hand, do these associations occur to me because my enculturation amalgamates Asian voices into a homogenizing stew?
Overall, please take my criticisms with a grain of well, salt. If I’m being honest, I respond to The Book of Salt with good old-fashioned jealousy. Truong’s intellect seems ferocious. Yale. Georgetown Law School. NPR picking up one of her essays. A year-long genius fellowship for her to Write a Novel. I have penned six novels under various pennames and have not won a national book award, nor has an Agency of Literary Taste dropped a year’s salary on my head for me to write my next novel, so my hackles rise whenever I see an Important Book whose jacket informs you the text is an author’s debut novel. Would you look at the back of “Guernica” and expect to read, “Pablo Picasso won the world genius award for visual art. This is his first painting?” Unlikely.
Again, I had to force myself through The Book of Salt. Like all books, I’m glad that I read it. I’m glad that Truong wrote it. Her subject deserves increased attention. I won’t be leaving a Michelin-starred review, however.