A twentysomething server discovers herself in a restaurant-set All approximately Eve. The book has problems,but the addictive rhythms of the writing will draw you inIn Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, yet another young person arrives in New York. She has the same empty 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, and 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, or such as publishing,who contain expense accounts that can accommodate markups on Pellegrino, and $12 appetizers with two ragged strips of prosciutto. It is, and in short,everything television promises approximately the glamour of life in the city.
You would contemplate a book approximately 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, or 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 whether many of them are successful. The tone isn’t the problem, usually, and 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 incorrect boy, or ” another section begins. “It was an easy prophecy. They were all the incorrect boy.”
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Source: theguardian.com