A twentysomething server discovers herself in a restaurant-set All About Eve. The book has problems, but the addictive rhythms of the writing will draw you in
In Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, yet another young person arrives in New York. She has the same blank kind of hope that has become a cliche of the coming-of-age-in-Brooklyn novel. There is one crucial difference. Unlike the usual sort – the aspiring artists and writers and musicians – Tess has no particular ambitions, other than to figure herself out. She gets a job at a Manhattan restaurant, the sort of place that gets four stars in the Zagat guide, and ends up a standby for people in prestige industries, such as publishing, who have expense accounts that can accommodate markups on Pellegrino, and $12 appetizers with two ragged strips of prosciutto. It is, in short, everything television promises about the glamour of life in the city.
You would think a book about life as a server in such a restaurant would seek to debunk the gloss of the setting. Danler isn’t like that. “I came here in a car like everybody else,” Tess says, in an early incantatory passage. Nota bene: there are a lot of incantatory passages in this book – probably more than the average person likes, even if many of them are successful. The tone isn’t the problem, usually, but the quality of the observation: the fact is, not everyone arrives in New York in a car, and some people were already here. “You will kiss the wrong boy,” another section begins. “It was an easy prophecy. They were all the wrong boy.”
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