Moviegoers have been eating in theatres for about as long as theatres have existed, in large part because theatres need us to. When the Great Depression threatened the movie-theatre business, owners started, somewhat reluctantly, selling cheap concessions at high margins. It was an instant success, and food has kept theatres afloat ever since, accounting, in recent years, for as much as forty per cent of profits. Eating and watching, in general, are a natural pairing, two intensely enjoyable, relatively passive activities that together inspired an entire category of frozen food.
As box-office numbers suffer—thanks, in part, to the culture of streaming movies and shows at home on the couch—more theatres (including, even, certain branches of the mega-chain AMC) are attempting to make theatre-going both as comfortable as being at home and as exciting, and expensive, as going to a restaurant. And why not? Sometimes popcorn and candy simply aren’t enough, a truth I learned early on, from my late grandmother, who used to smuggle foil-wrapped hamburgers into theatres, hidden beneath the knitting in her tote bag.
Today, one dollar is disposable. You can find loose singles on the street with some frequency, perhaps because they’ll get you very little these days in New York. At most street corner carts, a dollar won’t buy a cup of coffee, nor will it buy a copy of the New York Post. Dollar slice pizza is a revelation for New Yorkers, an easy exchange for the time-burdened—free of tax, coins, or time constraints. Just walk in, hand over a lone piece of currency, and receive pizza in return.
It’s a beautiful system, but it’s quickly vanishing from the city’s food landscape right from under our noses. The spots that used to churn out this style of pizza, many of which still have the awnings over them marking them as $1 slice establishments, are giving way to outside forces and silently raising prices to $1.25, $1.50, and even two dollars per slice.
A few days after the funeral, my older son, Josh, now 30, went on a shopping trip with my wife. He brought back a liter of Woodford Reserve Kentucky Straight Bourbon. I thought about it for a few seconds and said, “You know, I think that’s the first bottle of hard liquor we’ve ever had in our house.”
He looked up and replied, “You do realize that’s not normal,” the implication being that our example had, at some earlier juncture in his life, led him into thinking the occasional drink was some sort of moral failure.
He’d probably also discovered that living among four thousand or so books wasn’t exactly the American norm, either. That’s the way it is among families. Children absorb the culture of their homes and only later in life gain the distance to question it. Parents, either consciously or unconsciously, inculcate their values and loves. For much of my younger son’s 26 years, I tried to pass to him my love of reading literature.
The novel, then, is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now, for a sense of vast dispossession to live beside day-to-day misery and poverty. Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel.
Typically, on his curious journey between laybys, Le Bas is met with the question, “katar avilan?” – “where do you come from?” By the end of the book, both he and the reader have a much clearer idea of how to answer.
But ultimately, it’s a book to be savoured less for its page-turning propulsion than for its granular evocation of family life. The ending – no grand payoff – is deliciously poised, adding to hints from the narrative’s occasional habit of zooming proleptically into the future that this hugely enjoyable and unashamedly old-fashioned novel might become the basis of a Galsworthy-style Essinger saga.