{"id":1408,"date":"2014-06-22T02:22:39","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T21:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=1408"},"modified":"2014-08-28T00:46:45","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T19:46:45","slug":"book-review-taste-by-daisy-rockwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2014\/06\/book-review-taste-by-daisy-rockwell\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REVIEW: “Taste” by Daisy Rockwell"},"content":{"rendered":"
Daisy Rockwell’s debut novel is a nuanced and darkly humorous exploration of the role of people’s aesthetic sensibilities in governing their lives, whether as lifestyle determinants or relationship dealbreakers.<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/h6>\n

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\"Taste_Cover_04mar14_hi\"<\/a>Publisher\u2019s Blurb: Daniel is a twenty-first century connoisseur with distinctive and often anachronistic tastes\u2014aesthetic, culinary, and even mind-altering. When Daniel sets out to seek answers about his past in long-sealed documents, he makes a startling discovery that leads him on a cross-country quest. In the course of his travels, he becomes preoccupied with Antoinette, an enigmatic archivist who may hold the key to his search. When he discovers she may be involved with his closest friend, Roger, he comes to distrust them both. His quest becomes a dangerous obsession that drives him to the brink of madness. Rockwell\u2019s prose evokes the dark humor of Edgar Allan Poe and the uneasy aristocrats of Edith Wharton in this new novel of aesthetic obsession.<\/em><\/p>\n

Paperback, 210 pages
\nPublished April 15th<\/sup> 2014 by Foxhead Books
\nISBN: 9940876041\u00a0(ISBN13:\u00a09789940876043)<\/em><\/p>\n

When I started reading Daisy Rockwell\u2019s debut novel Taste<\/em>, I couldn\u2019t have been more wrong in assuming what kind of book it was going to be. I had thought it would be a high-culture mystery novel about a family heirloom and its place in the secrets of that family\u2019s past. In my mind\u00a0the plot would go\u00a0something like this: the \u201cRobert Langdon of antique furniture\u201d would team up with \u2013 surprise, surprise \u2013 a beautiful-but-mysterious curator on a cross-country chase to solve a historical mystery and most likely also hook up along the way. However, it eventually became apparent that this was not the story Rockwell was telling, not by a mile. In fact, Taste <\/em>is not even a story per se; it is essentially a character study, and a darkly funny one at that.<\/p>\n

Initially, I was not particularly intrigued by the direction the narrative seemed to be taking: Daniel, the protagonist, visits Schiffley House \u2013 the stately home of an aristocratic Philadelphia family, now turned into a museum \u2013 in order to research the connection between the Schiffleys and his own grandfather. There he is surprised to see a very distinctive table – wooden, with a glass top that encases wax fruit inside – which the docent reveals is one of only two of its kind, the twin of which happened to belong to Daniel\u2019s grandmother and was an object of fascination for Daniel as a child (though it is now long-lost). The presence of this table at Schiffley House opens up new questions in Daniel\u2019s research. He meets with the head curator, a beautiful woman named Antoinette, who is suspiciously suspicious of Daniel\u2019s interest and guards the house\u2019s archives a bit too closely. Interest piqued yet? By chapter four, so was mine. But then suddenly \u2013 hold on to your hats \u2013 the novel swerves into an unexpected side street and takes us way, way off course from the journey we thought we were on.<\/p>\n

This side street appears in chapter five, when Rockwell begins focusing exclusively on the life and habits of her protagonist, who had hitherto seemed rather bland. Suddenly, the reader receives a barrage of dynamic character information and Daniel is endowed with a personality, including some rather remarkable eccentricities. Taste<\/em>\u2019s most on-the-nose element of \u201ctaste\u201d \u2013 and its protagonist\u2019s principle defining characteristic \u2013 does not make an appearance until we\u2019re almost one-fifth of the way into the novel: Daniel is an avid taste collector, who experiments with and meticulously catalogues his sensory impressions of various foods and ingredients, with the aim of perfecting his knowledge of the tastes of various things the way a botanist memorizes the names and features of plant species. Oh, and he also sometimes snorts cocaine in order to heighten his sensory perceptions when collecting these tastes. Sudden as it is, all of this information is actually very welcome to the reader at this point;\u00a0within a few richly descriptive paragraphs, the main character of\u00a0Taste<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0elevated from Dan Brown drabness to Arthur Conan Doyle complexity. Whatever preconceptions I had going into the novel, I now knew I would have to shed them.<\/p>\n

Rockwell\u2019s prose is flavourful in a very neat and clean sort of way \u2013 not unlike fruit encased in a glass-top table \u2013 and you can tell Taste <\/em>is written by a painter. The\u00a0style she uses for Daniel as the narrator of the novel is quaintly old-fashioned, so much so that I was initially very unsure of the temporal setting of the novel. Daniel has a very unusual voice for any young American man of contemporary times. I had a hard time coming up with a voice I could compare him with. A grim\u00a0version of Niles Crane from Frasier<\/em>? (More like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons<\/em>, as it turns out.) I asked Rockwell about this over email. \u201cHe’s eccentric, and he’s very much stuck in the past,\u201d she told me. \u201cThe style I imagined he would use to narrate his story is very 19th century, and I am a big fan of Dickens.\u201d And that certainly comes through when you read Taste<\/em>; Daniel as a character, as well as Rockwell\u2019s style of writing, seem to live wholeheartedly in a culture of yore. The entire middle part of the book, for instance, details Daniel\u2019s trip from Boston to Oxford via Chicago and Memphis, a journey taken by train and then taxi (because Daniel is afraid to fly). Rockwell spends a great deal of time and detail on this trip, and despite its meticulously recorded minutiae \u2013 what he ate, how he groomed himself and freshened up, what restaurants or museums he stopped by at \u2013 the account is never dull, thanks to Rockwell\u2019s crisp writing style, and it is so intimate that you feel as though you are accompanying Daniel hand-in-hand down\u00a0his slow, spiraling descent into madness.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the olden voice of Taste<\/em> can sometimes come off as jarring in the contemporary setting of the novel \u2013 but perhaps that was the idea. One minute, there is talk of friends exchanging letters on fine stationery, records playing on gramophones, and the reader is comfortably thinking along the lines of a certain epoch \u2013 when suddenly there is the jolting image of an apartment intercom, or talk of the \u201celectronic mail\u201d that Daniel can\u2019t bring himself to adapt to. He also owns a rarely-used laptop that he keeps stored away in his linen closet. The anachronistic elements throughout the novel are examples of how every aspect of Daniel\u2019s life is imbued with his tastes, his personal culture. He\u2019s the guy who\u2019ll be sitting freshly shaven on a train station bench, thinking deeply about things like elegant wood craftsmanship and paintings of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, making beautifully penned notes in his leather-bound journal \u2013 all the while studiously trying to ignore a Hare Krishna type who is dispensing pamphlets of \u201ctruth\u201d, as an absurdly violent commercial involving a baby carriage being hurled down a stairway is being filmed around them.<\/p>\n

At its finest, Taste <\/em>is a nuanced exploration of aesthetic sensibility and its role in our lives and relationships. Rockwell offers a humorous take on how people react to perceived affronts to their personal taste, and the extent to which divergence in taste influences our social interactions. This is something we should all be particularly familiar with in the age of our Facebooked badges of identity, waving our Likes around like flags and engaging in heated, polarizing debates of \u201cbook-faithfuls versus TV-adaptation-watchers\u201d. The AV Club posted an online discussion recently on cultural dealbreakers<\/a> – \u201ccultural products that someone can profess to enjoy only while losing all of your respect\u201d. Discussion participants\u2019 dealbreakers ranged from Ayn Rand to Ashlee Simpson concerts, and there were also those who proclaimed they couldn\u2019t get along with anyone who had a cultural dealbreaker at all. Daniel\u2019s dealbreaker, as it so happens, is all things camp, and he notes the ubiquity of the camp aesthetic in modern culture with despair: ten instances of the word \u201ccamp\u201d or \u201ccampy\u201d in the New Yorker! So vehemently against the camp aesthetic is our hero, that his longtime friendship with Roger Pencil is truly threatened not just when Roger takes up with Antoinette, but when he convinces Daniel to visit Graceland, that holy land of campiness \u2013 with its \u201ctawdry furnishings that were meant convey a sense of luxury, but instead provided evidence of a gaping, empty soul.\u201d It is this event, and its fuchsia velvet, animal-print assault on Daniel\u2019s eyeballs and on his refined sensibilities, that really sets in motion the sinister events to come.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the table that becomes Daniel\u2019s obsession is itself so markedly different from his usual taste, though he does not seem to acknowledge this to himself. When an urbane humanities academic with a very stylish home d\u00e9cor calls the table \u201cawful\u201d and then \u2013 upon seeing the look of horror on Daniel\u2019s face \u2013 adds that it would of course have had \u201ccamp value\u201d, Daniel is extremely annoyed and makes an uncharacteristically rude departure. The table, delightfully kitschy as it is with its visual cacophony of waxen fruit, stands out starkly in every \u201ctastefully decorated\u201d setting we find it in over the course of the novel. Daniel\u2019s fascination with it began when he was a child, and so we understand that he loves the table as an artifact from his childhood. And it is in fact based on a real table from Rockwell\u2019s own life. (I suggested to Rockwell that the table might be Daniel\u2019s personal Graceland; she replied in mock-horror, \u201cHow dare you!\u201d)<\/p>\n

Despite the novel\u2019s merits as a treatise on aesthetic obsession, I could not help feeling that there were certain narrative gaps that kept niggling at my mind as I read. I was confounded by the novel\u2019s complete avoidance of the questions raised by Daniel\u2019s visit to Schiffley House at the beginning, or its amnesia regarding Daniel\u2019s original project: the research into his grandfather\u2019s work. The sudden change in focus that came about in chapter five was hard to come to terms with, because it all but abandoned what I had assumed was the central mystery of the novel. It was not a mere detail or two that Rockwell had used as red herrings; the entire, elaborate expositions of the initial chapters of the book \u2013 which set up the mystery of the Schiffley brothers and their physically connected houses, of the connection between Grand Jane and the Schiffleys, of the rift between Daniel\u2019s grandfather and the Schiffleys, of Antoinette\u2019s affinity with Larry Schiffley, of Daniel\u2019s obsession with Minerva Green \u2013 all of that was for naught, it seemed. I asked Rockwell if there were symbolic elements in those stories that went over my head, and she explained that Daniel\u2019s obsession with family and past are fundamentally a part of his character profile, as much as his aesthetic preoccupations. \u201cAs I was writing from the point of view of Daniel,\u201d she wrote in her email, \u201cI became more interested in his slowly becoming unhinged; the real plot was his mental disintegration. As such, the histories of the families were the kinds of things he thought about when he was doing better, and after a while he simply became fixated on the table and nothing more. In that sense, the novel fails to tie up loose ends because Daniel is simply a mass of loose ends by the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

While I do somewhat understand what the author wanted the novel to be about, the truth is that I was quite keen on seeing the stories told in Taste <\/em>come full circle, and I was disappointed and mystified when they didn\u2019t. Perhaps, akin to Daniel\u2019s observation about the Schiffley House docent\u2019s \u201cwords and explanations reducing the mysteries of life to a series of easily perceived tumours or polyps ready to be sliced out\u201d, Rockwell does not believe all of life\u2019s questions need to be answered. And that may be true for real life. Fiction, however \u2013 well, closure is one of the things fiction was invented for.<\/p>\n

\u00a0______________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"1544386_10153973216530571_699756311_n\"<\/a>Fatima Shakeel is a regular contributor to DWL and her work has also been featured in Papercuts. You can read more of her writing on her blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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