Never never swallow novelist blurbs on the back cover of a book you're considering borrowing or buying......
Especially the ones where they say they read it one sitting.........yeh, right. 352 pages clogged with the life threatening cholesterol of Graduate Student Creative Writing Class metaphors? Maybe a Gitmo terrorist prisoner could pull it off as an alternative to waterboarding, but for the rest of us mere mortal readers.....an impossibility.
Screw the hype. This book was a pain in the ass to plow through.
The story? Alice In Restaurant-Land.......fueled with rivers of booze, plentiful uppers, and blizzard-drifts of cocaine.
The 'Alice' here is called Tess, a Midwestern innocent who, in true movie-TV style, arrives in NYC and immediately snags a waitress job at a posh trendy restaurant-bar....
Tess, now immersed in all the inner workings of the place (one of the book's prime selling points....) learns exhaustive knowledge of wines and all the expected hurtful life lessons from her co-workers........(including the inevitable toxic love triangle she gets sucked into...)
What's good: the restaurant stuff, an all-access pass to every nook and cranny of an eatery, right down the vast piles of bugs who thrive behind the Fridge.
What's not: everything else. Reams and reams of pretentious, show-offy prose, drowning in its own navel-gazing self importance. Only once and a while do the characters speak in anything resembling human speech.......entire conversations are held in double-meaning, infinitely crafted sub-text, as if everyone's spouting obtuse lines of poetry at each other. 8 or 9 pages of this at a time drained the life out of us......
We were gobsmacked to hear they've turned this into a mini-series.......well, good luck with that. As for the book......strictly a 1 star (*) dining experience.
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