Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically . . . always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture.
— George Orwell, "Charles Dickens"

If Aimee Bender's second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), does not quite feel formless — and certainly not aggressively or ostentatiously so in the sense of an avant-garde provocation — it does frequently strike readers as a little squishy and undefined.1 A soberly-executed fantasia, at once fanciful and deeply fretful, the account of nine-year-old Rose Edelstein's sudden and unexplained acquisition of the ability to taste the emotions of those who prepare her food, and of the especially challenging adolescence that follows, might be expected to trouble at the level of tone. But almost no one objects to the suturing of a magical-realist premise to a finely limned psychological portrait; rather, those who find fault with the novel see it as under-realized, in the end not sufficiently itself. Chris Barsanti, reviewing the book on PopMatters, describes it as failing to "fully deliver on the promise of its central conceit," "veer[ing]" beyond Bender's "grasp."2 Jodi Chromey adopts the same verb: midway through, Bender "veers off" from Rose to focus on her distant, off-putting brother Joseph, who seems angrily unconcerned with Rose's travails — yielding a composite that doesn't "blend well," and "never seem[ing] to get her footing back."3 Eryn Loeb, at The Millions, finds Bender only "hint[ing]" at the "ethical dimension" of her theme, and "not really interested in [its] rather fascinating implications," ultimately lacking "the final word" on her own undertaking.4 Sampling even just the first handful of reviews on Goodreads at the time of this writing, one finds a preponderance of contributors — many of them self-described fans of Bender's short stories — lamenting the novel as "unfinished. hinted at. like an early draft, almost" (Oriana). Respondents deem the book "disjointed" and "incoherent" (Tracy), going "absolutely nowhere" with "a great premise" (Alicia), or managing only a series of "events . . . slapped together in a messy sort of way that made [one] feel tossed around from scene to scene in a random fashion" (Arlene). At best, many feel, the narrative takes a "puzzling turn" midway through (Helene Jeppesen) — that shift of attention from Rose to Joseph — from which it never recovers.5

The common language of implied trajectories abandoned or cut short reveals a shared intuitive postulate regarding the novel's unrealized form as both teleological and parsimonious: best dedicated to Rose and Rose alone, and duty-bound to shepherd her to a resolution that the book instead forecloses or even loses sight of. To some degree, this response measures the success of Rose's narratorial voice — supple, nuanced, gently wry and wisely retrospective — a voice that seems at best only partly achieved by the end of the novel, leaving a substantial gap between the Rose who develops over its course and the one who has narrated that development. But the resulting frustration should, I think, be understood as the engine of the novel's final accomplishment: the apparent mismatch, like that between Rose and Joseph themselves, speaks to the novel's larger gambit with (precisely) parts and wholes, in which the reader's perception of incompleteness becomes the measure and the mechanism of the book's coherence. Illuminating the consonance between Joseph's tale and Rose's requires fully engaging those elements of the book that appear "unbecoming" — both ungainly and unachieved — to parse the significance of the more radical threat of "unbecoming" that it narrates, in which Bender's magical realism allows her to play out twice over a bodily rendering of adolescence as an asymptotic approach to self-nullification rather than as an experience of integration and growth. At the same time, that downward trajectory rebounds into a layered reflection on literary forms. Hovering between the metaphorical and the literal, the corporeal impoverishment the novel narrates offers a way to concretize theoretical demystifications of both the genre Bender most clearly approximates, the Bildungsroman, and the achieved human subject at its heart. But it is also these very deficits that, in their poverty, push against the demystifications and enroll the reader's own bodily experience and unmet expectations to repudiate them.

The novel begins on a note of incipience it never entirely sheds, its tale of adolescence inaugurated at the precocious age of nine, and even then "in the week" leading up to Rose's birthday rather than on the day itself (3). Rose returns from school to find her mother, Lane, embarked on a "practice round" of baking, cake ingredients arrayed before her: "flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel," "a bowl of chocolate icing," and "another with rainbow sprinkles" (3-4). The descriptors are lambent, tactile, gently Pavlovian. They're also short-lived, a swift invocation of the simple pleasures the novel is poised to withhold until its conclusion. For the satisfaction hovering just out of reach of the reader's tongue unexpectedly proves even more distant from Rose's, discovering as she does in the cake not only the anticipated flavors but also the unwelcome savor of emotions inadvertently imparted to it by her mother: "in drifts and traces . . . the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset" and "distance," and ultimately a kind of "hollowness" (10). Rose initially understands this figurative hole at the core of the cake as a register of emotional absence — "My mother's able hands had made the cake, and her mind had known how to balance the ingredients, but she was not there, in it" — but over time it becomes clear that the opposite is the case, that Rose is tasting her mother's active repression of marital unhappiness (10). Rose's new sensitivity is both the condition of her adolescence and a metaphor for adolescence itself: the rising comprehension of the complexities of the surrounding emotional landscape, the moods and needs that parents (and others) are not eager to divulge, and the necessary perspicacity — hard-won, itself affectively challenging — required to navigate the hazardous shoals and hidden depths of the social.

At the same time, Rose's talent also manifests as a figure for the sympathetic engagement produced by novel-reading, the pedestrian ingredients like so many genre conventions and cultural codes transformed by the confectioner's magic into a glowing whole. Too, like a novel released into the world, the cake acts as an affective conduit in its creator's absence. Lane has retired for a nap by the time Rose removes the cake from the oven and discovers her mother's emotional signature lingering within, leaving Rose alone — as she so often is in the chapters that follow — in her struggle through both her own emotions and those of the people around her. Unfortunately for Rose, not only is the flavor of her mother's interior life decidedly unsavory, but so too is that of almost all the other cooks she can find. The first few examples, in quick succession: her brother Joseph's "toast with butter and jam and sprinkles of sugar" presents a difficult mass of "blankness and graininess," like "something folding in on itself" (37); the chocolate chip cookies at a specialty shop in the neighborhood distill the baker's "tight anger" (62); the sandwich made for the baker by his girlfriend screams with unrequited love (65). Further experiments broaden the range of feelings in play, but offer no respite from their intensity or their overwhelming tilt toward the negative. Society, whether that of her family members or of strangers, continually registers as a welter of undigested feeling welling up inside Rose, making the quest for physical nourishment into an unrelenting emotional minefield.

Rose's first impulse is, unsurprisingly, to shy away from eating at all. A fast route to the most literal "unbecoming" the novel might narrate, this strategy is obviously unsustainable. Instead Rose learns to concentrate her attention away from the emotional aggregate of the food she eats by focusing on sourcing ingredients, tracing each back to farm or factory.6 In time, she develops the ability to distinguish the geographical origin, mode of production, and route traveled to point of sale for the many components of every comestible that goes into her mouth. In the context of the figurative economy linking the consumption of food to that of fiction, we might think of this as a Barthesian strategy, analytically disassembling food into its ingredients in much the same fashion as Barthes teases apart, in S/Z, the literary codes and cultural conventions that together animate Balzac's story "Sarrasine," stripping away the immersive quality of the reading experience in favor of a critical accounting for its structure and effects.7 Barthes' explosion of the text is also an exploding of the humanist subject, a connection he draws most resoundingly in "The Death of the Author," with its characterization of the text as no more than "a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture," and the writer in turn as not "express[ing] himself," his "passions, moods, sentiments, impressions," but simply amalgamating the contents of an "immense" and "ready-made" dictionary.8 Less frequently quoted is the corollary redescription a few pages later of the reader who might be capable of discerning all the myriad tributaries in a text thus decomposed. All the verve and pertinacity Barthes subsequently displays in S/Z notwithstanding, he recognizes in the earlier essay that no individual human reader could hope to completely delineate all a text's ingredients, that the reader his essay envisions as a counterpart to the "death of the author" could only be "a man [sic] without history, without biography, without psychology," which is to say not a human individual at all.9

Bender follows this logic, likewise progressing from disaggregation to a more radical dehumanization. Rose's second and more enduring approach to nourishing herself is to embrace factory food whenever possible, finding her ideal in products that have never been touched by human hands.10 Rose dots the narrative with small paeans to products like Doritos and Oreos that keep her body functioning when all the foodier food is anathema: corporatized foodstuffs, relentlessly engineered and branded, the cheery final o's of their names like open mouths or empty stomachs or zeroes obliquely signaling their nutritional nullity. This diet, nevertheless, makes it possible for Rose to pick and stumble her way through adolescence, minimally sustaining her through her mother's affair, her father's affable cluelessness, and her brother's cruelty and distance. Rose charts a risk-averse path through this landscape, ultimately a self-negating one. She spends most of her free time at home, eschewing close friendships, allowing by senior year of high school an occasional tightly circumscribed make-out session with an "old dodgeball rival" named Eddie who deems her "the perfect girl" because she "expect[s] nothing" (156-57). His compliment echoes the conclusion of a presentation Rose makes years earlier in her junior-high current-events class. The assignment is a speech on a valued aspect of modern society that was "not around" in the time of the students' grandparents (124). Sandwiched between peers' encomia to mountain biking and malaria treatment, Rose extols the Dorito, emphasizing the appeal of its chemical signature for a "zoned-out mind," and concluding triumphantly, "A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there" (128).

If the Dorito answers to Rose's need for emotional bulwarks through its own inhuman origin, her analysis offers a warning of the kind of negligent inhumanity it might engender. Asking nothing, expecting nothing — the effective hollowing out Rose has cultivated — grades rhetorically into a deeper absence: the "not-there-ness" that takes center stage with Joseph in the novel's second half. For while Rose embraces factory food as a way of holding herself together, it comes to represent an ironic alternative peril, that of losing herself entirely to its own anodyne vacuity. Bender never says "you are what you eat" (or more pointedly, "if you eat wrong, you simply aren't"), but the emptiness of Rose's increasingly restricted diet implicitly issues this threat of self-cancellation with rising force . . . until it is half-supplanted, and at the same time more thoroughly explained, by a more audacious ontological reimagining that comes to the fore in the "Joseph" half of the book.

I've already suggested that this race to the bottom is counterbalanced by the novel's tone, which is anything but despairing. Warm but also arch, succinct and yet expansive in its empathy, Rose's narrative voice implies a self-awareness and self-confidence that her character pointedly lacks. This fact significantly skews the reading process, the promise implicit within it brightening every step in Rose's descent, recasting the novel's domestic drama in light of expectations derived — however improbable it might seem in the moment — from the Bildungsroman. This airy but unsubstantiated sense of possibility might be appropriate to what Jeffrey L. Sammons calls a "phantom genre" born out of scholarly desire rather than out of concrete examples in nineteenth-century German fiction.11 Sammons begins his influential essay on the genre by averring that "[i]f a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of German, one of them is likely to be Bildungsroman" ("MMB" 229), but then goes on to establish Goethe's foundational Wilhelm Meister novels as maybe the only true exempla of the form before it's resuscitated a century later by German novelists self-consciously plumbing "internal literary traditions" in response to the disillusionments of modernity ("MMB" 242). Sammons points to a "long series" of scholars who have preceded him in determining that "the Bildungsroman concept collapse[s] when applied to specific cases," and others have followed ("MMB" 237). At base, Sammons argues, "the most creative minds" of the nineteenth century "could not sustain the social and humanistic optimism without which the scheme of Wilhelm Meister collapses," yielding no more than "verbal allegiance" to a "reductive shibboleth" ("MMB" 241, 242).12

And yet the nomenclature retains its currency. Scholar after scholar disclaims the genre, and then works expansively upon it.13 Even though Sammons debunks the widespread assumption that the genre is "predominant and characteristic" of the nineteenth century in his 1981 essay ("MMB" 239), six years later Franco Moretti repeatedly adopts almost exactly this language in his monograph on the form, The Way of the World, calling it "the dominant genre of Western narrative" and adverting to its "centrality . . . not only in the history of the novel, but in our entire cultural legacy."14 For while Moretti, too, concludes by granting a singular status to Wilhelm Meister and allowing that "only a handful of texts . . . fully correspond" to the "principles" of what he calls "the classical Bildungsroman," he appears to pine for the form's salience in shaping the "free individual" into a "convinced citizen" — reconciling the restless energy of youth with the social structures it runs up against and brokering the compromises that sustain the modern liberal order itself.15 Moretti juggles throughout, lavishly illuminating and exfoliating the stakes of a genre he doesn't quite believe in. The ardency of his desire makes him a critical analogue for the lay readers with whom I began, as well as the German novelists of the twentieth century cited by Sammons. Readers of many stripes, it appears, want the Bildungsroman. Critics understand why they can't have it, but continually half-reconstitute it all the same. Bender, I will show, finds a way to both deny it and tee it up.

For critics, the genre's pull becomes most clear as a kind of inverted back-formation. In an appendix written for the reissue of his book in 2000, Moretti solidifies his vision of the nineteenth-century form in theorizing the Bildungsroman's untenability for the twentieth century. Writers including Rilke, Kafka, and Joyce attempted to extend the Bildungsroman's purchase into their rapidly changing world, Moretti argues, but were "forced into modernism by [their] failure with the previous form."16 For World War I left youth "maimed, shocked, speechless, decimated," turning "in revulsion" from the very idea of maturity, even as the growth of various "impersonal institutions" with a vested interest in the work of maturation but little patience for idiosyncratic approaches to that project — Church, School, business bureaucracy — emerged as a "massive historical fact" bullying young men forward.17 Meanwhile, "socially illicit" but "psychically irresistible" desires "pulverize[d]" whatever of the ego remained.18 Citing narratological taxonomies created by Barthes and Seymour Chatman, Moretti evokes the loss of experience organized around "kernels" of opportunity set among subordinate "satellite" events.19 Instead, a world that is at best "thoroughly indifferent to [the hero's] development" and more likely actively inimical to it yields an increasingly relentless onslaught of "kernels . . . no longer produced by the hero as turning points of his free growth — but against him," "traumas" that threaten both the coherence of the hero's ego and the coherent temporality of the novelistic form that had previously shepherded that ego to maturity.20 The Bildungsroman's essential project — "the legitimation of the social system inside the mind [sic] of individuals" — is at this point supplanted by "sheer coercion."21

Moretti's account of the early-twentieth century's "hero's" development finds a historical antecedent in Susan Fraiman's analysis of heroines in nineteenth-century fiction. These women, rather than "self-staging, . . . taking one's formation into one's own hands," she writes, have "a clearer sense that formation is foisted upon them, that they are largely what other people, what the world, will make of them."22 For female protagonists, the genre's basic assumptions fail to hold: "What [Frances] Burney's subtitle [to Evelina] calls 'a young lady's entrance into the world' might be more accurately described as a young lady's floundering on the world's doorstep."23 Fraiman in fact precedes me in the usage of "unbecoming" as a multivalent descriptor for "growing up female as a deformation, a gothic disorientation, a loss of authority, an abandonment of goals," making nineteenth-century heroines the augurs not just of the fate befalling young male protagonists at the advent of modernism, but also of the "poststructuralist sense of identity" to come, "identity as conflicted and provisional," "integrated selfhood as the clashing, patchwork product of numerous social determinations, the 'I' as basically unstable and discontinuous."24 Bender remakes the dynamics of imposition and impasse two hundred years on by means of her magical imaginary, with its near-literalization of the notion that external forces might not simply impose themselves inexorably upon an individual from without, but might also remake the self from within.

In this her novel joins others as different as Octavia Butler's near-apocalyptic science fiction Parable of the Sower (1993) and Jonathan Lethem's noir/comic detective fiction Motherless Brooklyn (1999).25 All three writers undermine the sense of a discrete self — no matter how vexed by outer pressures or inner demons — that Moretti assumes. Instead, they imagine selves that are significantly constructed by external, social factors that nevertheless manifest not as imprinting themselves from outside the individual but rather as hijacking her from inside — whether through Lauren Olamina's "hyperempathy syndrome," which causes her literally to feel the physical pain she witnesses in those around her, or through Lionel Essrog's Tourette Syndrome, which renders his speech an involuntary echo chamber for language born elsewhere, and his body a compendium of likewise reiterative tics. Bender extends this shared conceit in Lemon Cake, taking the existential threat to her protagonist further. While Lauren is intermittently debilitated by the psychic price of even passing observations of the wounded around her, and Lionel constantly distracted by his cognitive and behavioral porousness, the very maintenance of Rose's body requires the continual ingestion of alien emotions; she is physically constituted by the affective landscape around her. In Butler's and Lethem's books, the material inputs affecting the protagonists' constitutions derive throughout from specific people in close proximity. But as Rose leans into the most processed of foods, she becomes ever more the creature of all-but-anonymous corporate entities. These are not the shadowy and malicious agents of Pynchonian paranoia, nor even Moretti's metastasizing institutions eagerly harvesting the young. Rather, they simply represent the quietly abiding substructure of contemporary life, blandly offering to take up the work of living on our behalf. The "many arbitrary and unfair punishments" Moretti finds attempting to enforce fealty to the social system in the dying throes of the Bildungsroman in the 1910s give way, a century on, to the more insidious forms of persuasion from within that we increasingly recognize as the signature of the digital age.26 The infinitely personalized blandishments of the most grand and impersonal institutions become ever harder to avoid or ignore, ever more precisely tailored to our distracted, focus-tested tastes. "What is good about a Dorito," Rose claims, is that one is "not supposed to pay attention to it." If one does, "it tastes like every other ordinary chip." But to an absent mind, one that "stop[s] paying attention, it becomes the most delicious thing in the world" (127).

Joseph's story essentially fast-forwards through the implications of this appeal. Here, too, Fraiman helps, observing in her archive a frequent "blurring or decentering of the 'major' narrative by alternative stories of female destiny, so that each text is less the telling of one life than a struggle between rival life stories."27 Joseph's fate accords with this model in presenting a fuller "history of obstruction, imposition, and loss" than Rose's does, but his plot is best described not as an "antagonistic" "demystification," so much as an elucidation.28 For many readers, however, as we have seen, it feels both antagonistic and mystifying. As if outpacing Rose on her slow march to "not-there-ness," midway through the book Joe "take[s] to disappearing" from the house (114). Not out the side door from his bedroom pointedly installed in the opening chapters, but in some more mysterious fashion: "He wasn't in the room," Rose says, "but it felt, faintly, like he was in it" (122). It takes another fifty pages for her to figure out why, when she gets a glimpse of Joe's legs fusing with those of a "[c]heapo" plastic and aluminum card-table chair (190), and a hundred pages more for him to reveal to her, in the novel's penultimate scene, that he has cultivated the ability to subsume himself into any of the various pieces of furniture in his bedroom. "[H]e had been the bed, the dresser, the table, the nightstand," but "the chair was his favorite" (288), a fact that Bender suggests owes to its mass-produced anonymity, its extreme reducibility. "No style," Lane observes, when the chair first enters the house, but Joseph "seem[s] to truly value chairs that [can] fold so easily into a line" (190). Joseph is in fact flatlining, himself, returning from his disappearances spent, clinically dehydrated, "limbs spread out like a starfish" on his bedroom floor (164). But that flat line doubles as a synecdoche for the evasion of emotion that spurs him toward the furniture to begin with, making good on the opacity and unavailability he cultivates — or labors under — from the start. After the first instance in which Rose finds him inexplicably departed, the ludicrousness of his excuse upon returning — that he was in Rose's room, searching for "a pink Pegasus pen" (123) — leads them both to collapse into highly uncharacteristic laughter, although his is already "low and almost silent and throaty" (123). When Rose tries to resuscitate the moment the next morning, monologuing her way through a recapitulation of the exchange, Joseph declines the bait, "his mouth a line" (125).

If Rose's condition functions as a metaphor for the empathetic investments of novel-reading, however ambivalently those investments are construed within this narrative, Joseph's is an elective refusal of all such ties, of sentiment and of psychology itself. The ascendency of his story to Bender's primary narrative focus in the second half of the novel feels like something of a black hole, a zone of affectless refusal siphoning the reader's attention and energy away from what she has understood to be the novel's primary concerns, away from the novelistic itself. Joseph reassures Rose that being "away" doesn't hurt, but moves into more alarming territory in affirming as well that he doesn't "know anything, while [he's] away," or "feel the passage of time" (289) — spurning the fundaments of narration that Rose labors to sustain, along with her bodily integrity, through the long years of her adolescence. He's ever more a cipher even when present, gradually moving toward an existence as hermitic and hermetic as possible in a barebones apartment located in a complex with a name "so vague" that Rose can "never remember it" (181), and then from the apartment into the chair. His departure from the family home into greater Los Angeles is motivated, then, not by the ambitious courting of experience, the "inner restlessness" that Moretti places at the heart of the traditional Bildungsroman, but by its exact opposite: the pursuit of an infinite, self-negating solitude.29 Rose's parents ignorantly cling to the conventions of the standard narrative of adolescence, telling themselves when Joseph occupies the chair for good that he must have slipped out of his apartment's tiny second-floor window and carried himself off to the Andes or the Australian coast — undertakings that Rose explicitly characterizes as "full of quest and literature and nobility of spirit" (278). But Rose recognizes that Joseph's escape is not "emotional," and not literary either, not in the sense of a developing self's "becoming," or even in the simpler sense of being interested in communication — that he has merely folded in on himself completely, from "as alone as possible" to "aloner than alone," to "alonest" (187).30

Joseph's choice to align himself with factory furniture comes to gloss Rose's long dalliance with factory food. If Joseph's allowing the "assertion of the chair over him, like the chair was dispelling him, or absorbing him" (190), at first seems the opposite of Rose's ingestion of Oreos and Doritos to keep herself alive, Bender is quick to establish a deeper parallelism arraigning Rose, too, to the "machine-tinge[d]" subtractive side of the equation (242). In the disarray after Joseph's disappearance, Rose undertakes the unprecedented act of cooking dinner for herself and her parents. This Malkovich moment turns out to be less clotted with self than one might expect.31 Or, more accurately, she's faced with two versions of herself, neither of them satisfactory and only one of them recognizably human. She tastes first "a sickly-sweet nostalgia . . . a little-girl voice wanting to go back . . . to a time with less information" (240-42), and then "a factory," "cold" and unfamiliar (222). The significance of the nostalgic taste is obvious to Rose and to the reader: a desire to go back to the naïve simplicity of age eight. But the factory is a narrative surprise and an interpretive puzzle that rattles through the remainder of the novel. "To taste a factory was no big deal," Rose reports, "I tasted them all the time. I knew them by name and often even by address. But I thought I knew all the factories in America, and the entrance of a new one in that meal had surprised me, a lot" (241). She researches the matter assiduously, in the family pantry and then at the supermarket, but is unable to place the factory or to source an ingredient to it, and finally reaches the conclusion that its unknown flavor must have "come from the cook" (242). Rose likens tasting the factory to two other experiences: seeing her brother fused with the chair, and failing to recognize herself in a family photo while paging through an old album with her mother (242). She offers no abstract categorization joining the three beyond reporting the extreme distaste she feels for each, but the point seems clear enough: her efforts at self-preservation have brought her to the brink of destroying the very self she's worked to preserve.

A refusal of engagement and empathy is, figuratively for Rose but for Joseph literally, dehumanizing. And the victim of this dehumanization is not the other who is pushed away or frozen out, but s/he who suppresses emotion in the first place. Very late in the novel, Bender underscores this point when Rose learns from her father that "skills" like hers run in her paternal line: that her grandfather could smell people's emotions in much the way that Rose tastes them — leading him to take refuge behind a cloth mask when out shopping (267). Her father, too, has a "hunch" he has never dared to investigate that he could "do something special" for people in hospitals (261-63). This revelation leads her to suspect that Joseph's aggressive insularity might result not from maladjustment or misanthropy, but rather from a sensitivity to others' misery that dwarfs her own. All three men elect to shield themselves from both knowledge of and interaction with strangers — Rose's father refusing even to set foot in a hospital, Joseph obviously making the most radical refusal of all. Rose, by virtue of the particular contours of her sensitivity, has no such options. It's effectively on the strength of Joseph's cautionary tale, and interspersed with it in the novel's final chapters, that Rose begins to alter her course.

It's no coincidence that Rose's father's revelations occur immediately upon her return from a whirlwind visit to Boston to attend the wedding of Joseph's former best friend, George, whom the novel holds out across almost its entire length as the only real romantic prospect for Rose. The book-long tease is surely central to readers' complaints about the novel, but Bender must conclude in a minor key. Rose can't have the unequivocally happy ending of the classic Bildungsroman or the marriage plot, by dint of Bender's genre critique and also because she can't simply reproduce the scars of her own upbringing, even if she must also repudiate the empty space of corporate manufacture. And so Bender carefully installs her in a middle zone, straddling the public and the private. Somewhat ahead of the conversation with her father, Rose supplements her day job in cable TV advertising with a position washing dishes on weekends at a French café serving what is (for Rose) the most palatable food in the city. Until the conversation with her father, Rose maintains a deliberate anonymity at the café. The day after learning of her ambivalent inheritance, however, Rose excuses herself from the kitchen to join customers at a wine-tasting in front, contriving thus to introduce herself meaningfully to the proprietors, an older Lyonnaise couple she knows only as "Madame" and "Monsieur." She blithely proposes a "food tasting," and then proceeds to dazzle all within earshot by discerning the "two different milks" in the morning's quiche ("One is cream, from Nevada, . . . due to the slightly minty flavor, but there's regular milk, too, from Fresno"), the organic pigs raised "east of Modesto" and identifiable by their "grainy" aftertaste, the fact that the parsley farmer "is a jerk," and more (272). Three things happen at once here: first, and most obviously, Rose asserts herself — asserts her self — unequivocally, unapologetically: "I had wanted to introduce myself," she says afterward, "to people I wanted to meet. That was the whole of it" (274). The latter sentence reads initially as a matter-of-fact, slightly deflating summary of the event, but the collation of self and wholeness underscores the audacity and the importance of the moment: a first reclamation of the "I" that has all but disappeared into Rose's evasive, mechanical routines. Secondly, then, Rose claims for herself, in positive terms, the crucial adjective from Bender's title. After spending the majority of the narrative on the run from the particular sadness of her family and defensively breaking food down into the particular natures of its component ingredients, and having lit at length on the work of a particular chef who is "so connected with the food that [she can] really, for once, enjoy it" (244), Rose now presents herself as particularly skilled — as a very particular individual in her own right. Monsieur responds in kind, asking, "What's your name again?" (thus literalizing the "introduction" Rose has played for) and ushering her into the cooking side of business (276). Which is to say, third, that Rose makes a hesitant entrance into a conception of the social that is meaningful for her and for those around her.

This advance remains, all the same, exploratory and incomplete — merely a first step toward the elegant balance of self and society at which the classic Bildungsroman arrives. Moretti quotes Wilhelm Dilthey: "man [sic] is truly 'himself' only in as much as he exists 'für das Ganze', for the Whole" (18), and elaborates, referencing Goethe: "One must learn . . . like Wilhelm, to direct 'the plot of [his own] life' so that each moment strengthens one's sense of belonging to a wider community."32 Rose achieves the first intimations of such a sense of belonging only at the close, and is less directing the plot than edging back toward a stage abandoned long before. She progresses only so far as being invited to move from washing dishes to chopping onions (277) and in the likewise nascent opportunity — proffered by a customer who witnesses her display at the wine-tasting — to employ her talent helping "at-risk kids" manage their feelings (281). These developments offer a partial displacement of marriage plot and domesticity: Rose fashions a liaison with the perfect quasi-parental couple rather than the perfect romantic match, and she will guide but not mother children.33 Similarly, she will not be a chef but a prep-cook; she will likely cry copiously, but because she is chopping onions. Not ersatz so much as apprentice, Rose is finally able to begin to trade on her tremendously weighty emotional experience and intelligence to initiate the more worldly education that might otherwise have commenced years earlier. The restaurant, in Rose's own estimation, offers "a kind of gateway into the world" (244), positioning her to begin at last the process of negotiating the social on her own terms and in her own interest rather than finding the terms dictated simultaneously from within and without. It is not that she has by the end of the novel won "meaning" as Moretti defines it in Wilhelm Meister — identical to "connection" (18), a "happy belonging to a harmonious totality" (65) — but she's moved a half-step beyond the deformations Fraiman observes. For the first time, belonging is conceivable, a potential outgrowth of the novel's closing events, because she has finally reconstituted in the novel's closing pages an approximation of the coherent self that she loses at the start, and that the classical Bildungsroman presupposes throughout.

Bender more convincingly depicts that coherent totality in the café's offerings, which initiate the process of integration after long years in which Rose has preoccupied herself with disaggregation, and which serially anticipate Rose's own development from a recovered self toward a broadening social circle. The first dish Rose consumes at the café is a bowl of soup that earns a string of adjectives more suggestive of the personal than the culinary: "warm, kind, focused, whole" (209). Later, she feels "how delighted [Madame] had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese" in a quiche, "like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love" (244). Finally looking Madame in the eye after the tasting, Rose arrives at a characterization of Madame herself that directly resonates with Moretti's vocabulary: "the cook loves to mix . . . . Loves the harmony of putting the right ingredients together. Loves to combine" (273). The harmonious wholeness of dishes at the café makes them more than ensembles of particulars, and Bender's appeal to our deep bodily understanding of cooking's alchemy models a vision of synthesis that obtains both socially and aesthetically. The possibility of breaking a text down into its component parts, no matter how minutely achieved, she suggests, not only fails to dispel their effect in the aggregate but also fails even to describe their effect in the aggregate. Barthes' extreme articulation of the textual turn, his militant textualizing of the physical parties to the act of reading — a writer whose "identity" "flees" into "obliquity" (49), a reader recast as a mere "space" wherein "all the citations out of which a writing is made" are "inscribed" (54) — is requited by Bender's concretization in turn of his own metaphor in culinary terms.

Bender does not give us the Bildungsroman proper, but she does place Rose, to use Fraiman's words, "on the world's doorstep," not "floundering" but finally having found her feet. Newly poised, in two senses of the word, Rose promises to deliver on the premise that Moretti and Barthes believe no longer possible, precisely by virtue of having been subjected to the tribulations of an embattled gender and genre, both. Her body long stretched thin between the genre's putative assurances and a debunking thereof, she is positioned in the end to reject the binary Moretti sets out at the close of his appendix, opining that "literature is not produced to multiply symbolic tensions out of control, but rather to reduce and contain them," because symbolic forms are "fundamentally problem-solving devices."34 Lemon Cake multiplies tensions in order to contain them, the problems it sets itself not just the unevenly distributed surplus of emotion at home and the excision of emotion from gargantuan commercial concerns, but also the apparent superannuation of the very literary device that might be expected to negotiate between them by constructing a version of the self that might compel belief in the wake of twentieth-century critique. Where Moretti sees the upsurge of the id in the modernist moment as "pulveriz[ing]" the ego (etymologically, reducing it to fine powder, particulate matter), and Barthes sees the "interior 'thing'" itself, the whole welter of "passions, moods, sentiments, impressions," as mere epiphenomenal manifestation of an infinity of textual tributaries — "a ready-made lexicon, whose words can be explained only through other words" — Bender reconstitutes a whole greater than the sum of its parts.35 Effectively, she breaks with Moretti's conclusion by doubling down on his vision — voiced with a hint of diffidence or defensiveness at the appendix's close — of literature as a source of aesthetic pleasure deriving from the fact that "solving problems is useful and sweet."36 Convinced that the discontinuities and "centrifugal tendencies" induced by wartime trauma are insuperable, he abandons, and laments, the Bildungsroman as one of the "dead branches" on what he's already starting to envision in Darwinian terms as the tree of literature.37 There's a telling resonance between the deconstructive stance Moretti disputes and the modernist aesthetic that he reads as an annunciation of the Bildungsroman's obsolescence: in both cases the multiplication of internal tensions renders the whole untenable. It's possible to understand his turn to distance reading as a sidestepping of this impasse. Distance reading constructs aggregates that cohere quantitatively rather than qualitatively, even as it walks away from the complexities of the human subjects — readers, writers, and publishers — who constitute those aggregates. Bender, grounded in an empiricism of individual bodily experience rather than one of publishers' rolls, makes a renewed case for the quality of coherence.

Bender gives a kind of corporeal form to formalism itself — its distillations, its itemizations, its fine discriminations — even as she disparages the etiolation of the body thus constituted. At the same time, she marries disparate narrative threads of her text in a whole that can seem like something less than the sum of its parts until subjected to a formalist gloss in its own right. But the book implicitly advocates for understanding such an analysis as the armature for an experience that leaves it behind. Formalism becomes the mechanism of becoming, just as Bender ultimately enrolls magic in support of realism. For, finally, given Bender's displacement of the Bildungsroman onto the territory of its own antecedence — the construction of a self sufficiently viable to initiate the project of making its way in the world — the most important negotiation in her novel is not between youthful impetuousness and societal norms, but between the clean lines of a schematic or the enumeration of a list and the fullness of experience. Bender projects simple realism as a kind of magic, bodily experience as another. The mundane conclusion of the novel — working three jobs, getting a minor promotion in one of them, warming up to the prospect of moving out of one's parents' house, enjoying a well-cooked meal — might be given a more heroic form by literary representation, the coherence of which might both reflect and help confer an internal sense of similar cohesion.

I adduce as coda an interview supporting the novel's publication, in which Bender confirms a rumor that some years earlier, in a cramped New York City apartment, she did her writing in a closet, furnished only with "a card table [and] a chair." After a "shocking almost three years," a breakup forced her into new quarters, where she "wrote happily outside the closet, and fact is," she reports, she "liked it better."38 While she's explicitly turned away from Lemon Cake at this point in the interview in order not to spoil the novel's surprises, we might still see some of its imaginary as deriving from this earlier episode in her writing life. Did Bender perhaps, in her darker moments, feel fused to that chair? Even if the interval yielded "a couple of [her] scariest stories," and thus "maybe . . . did work a little bit," might we still read her characterization of the experience as "a drag" in physical as well as emotional terms?39 In Lemon Cake, when Rose mutely presents the chair that Joseph has become to George — the most pleasant and fully self-actualized character in the book — George misunderstands what she's showing him and sits down. Rose swiftly corrects his error, but a point has been made. The furniture of the novel — its component parts, its scaffolding — is necessary, precisely that on which even its most compelling effects rest. But real people sit on it.

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Benjamin Widiss is associate professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Stanford, 2011). Material Effects: Textual Metaphors and Textual Presences in Contemporary Narrative is in progress.

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

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References

Epigraph. George Orwell, "Charles Dickens," in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This: 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 456.