"The Paris Novel," by Ruth Reichl

I have devoured (forgive food/book reference) food critic Ruth Reichl's several memoirs and other writings (See for example my post of 6/1/19 on her memoir "Save Me the Plums."). I have now just finished her absolutely enchanting new novel, "The Paris Novel" (Random House, 2024), and I loved its exquisite focus on the city of Paris, high fashion, and, especially, amazing and delicious French food. Stella lives in New York, leading a rather constrained life as a copy editor living on her own, but when her mother (with whom she has not been close) dies and leaves her money with instructions, surprisingly, for her to go to Paris, she does so. There she meets fascinating people and has magical adventures in the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, in several art museums, in a high fashion dress shop, in explorations of various parts of Paris and nearby towns, including beautiful houses and hotels and markets, and most of all, in a series of restaurants. It turns out that Stella has a hitherto undiscovered profound understanding of and appreciation of fine cooking and food, and one of the best parts of the novel is the mouth-watering descriptions of her experiencing the sense-filled and at the same time ethereal pleasures of fine French food. The story is full of interesting characters, and Stella herself blossoms as her world opens up. She has two quests, and -- not exactly a spoiler -- she achieves both. So okay, the novel is a kind of romantic fantasy, even a modern fairy tale, but it also includes some (not too heavy-handed) allusions to issues of identity, family, and other serious concerns. So this delicious (I couldn't resist...) novel is light yet substantive and meaningful in some ways, and an absolute delight to read.

RIP Ellen Gilchrist

I recently ran across a mention of the author Ellen Gilchrist and, in particular, of her short story collection "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams" (Little, Brown, 1981), and I remembered how much I had liked this book and others of Gilchrist's in the past, but had not thought about her work for years, perhaps decades. I immediately requested the above book at my local library. Then I went online to remind myself about her life and her books, and to my surprise, I saw that she had died in January of this year at the age of 88. I was surprised not to have heard this news, although I soon found that she had received obituaries in the New York Times and elsewhere that I had somehow missed. She was well-known in the 1980s especially, but less so in recent years. She was a National Book Award winner with a distinctive voice, often from the viewpoint of upper-class Southern women, but in unpredictable ways. Gilchrist, who was a Mississippi native and later lived in Arkansas, with a familiarity with New Orleans, often drew on her own life experiences, and was known for her "wry and poignant prose," as the Washington Post put it after her death. Interestingly, in college she studied under Eudora Welty. Gilchrist's characters were sometimes eccentric, seemingly free from certain societal constrictions (allowed to be so, it must be said, because of class privilege), yet still a part of the world of those constrictions. Her 26 books -- novels, stories, and essays -- often included recurring characters. I did reread "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams," and was glad to have revisited the world portrayed by Ellen Gilchrist. Perhaps I will soon reread her other most well-known work, "Victory in Japan" (1984) as well.