You’d figure that an area with so many Mexicans, from third-generation dining dynasties to families fresh across the border, would get some love from food critics. Nada. They instead obsess about the Mexican food in Los Angeles or San Antonio, which makes sense. Even New York’s Mexican food gets more foodie love. So does the American South. Austin. Portland.
Even I’ve ignored the Central Valley throughout my career — and I literally wrote the book about Mexican food in the United States. But after spending three days on Highway 99, eating from Bakersfield to Sacramento and back — from taco trucks to high-end restaurants, in rest stops and swap meets, from big cities to towns with barely 3,000 people — I am now a convert. And I’ll say it: Only Los Angeles and Houston — maybe — have better Mexican food scenes than the Central Valley.
In the early morning of Sept. 24, 2015, my friend Nick Louvel was driving north on Route 114 between East Hampton and Wainscott, New York, when deer appeared in the road, causing him to swerve and crash into a tree. This accident was witnessed by a taxi driver, stopped on the other side of the deer, who called 911, and a medical helicopter was dispatched and took Nick, who had suffered blunt-force trauma to his head, neck, and torso, to Stony Brook University Hospital, where doctors attempted to revive him. They were unable to, however, and he died, though I wouldn’t know until about eight hours later, when I received a succession of calls, the last of which was from Nick’s sister Diane.
In the months that followed fiction stopped working for me. I don’t mean to say I expected a novel to be a Xanax or my salvation. But I did of course, and I suspect anyone who has spent a good deal of their life reading and writing does. E.M. Cioran said he quit philosophy when it couldn’t cure his insomnia. I always took this to be a put-on, but here I was in my own version of that circumstance. I don’t just mean that fiction couldn’t take my mind off things. It was more total than that. Nearly every work of literature I picked up then struck me as misbegotten, a waste of human energy.
How do we tell our stories? What form best fits the autobiographical? Poetry and nonfictional prose each offer unique angles and approaches to addressing a past event or personal experience. But for many writers, working in one genre is not sufficient, or else a single genre does not exhaust a writer’s obsession with their subject matter.
“On a day somewhat early in September, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up.” So begins Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night,” and, as I read it almost fifty years after its first appearance, two things seem true and surprising about that sentence and the epoch-marking book it superintends. First, how funny it is, and then how self-aware—not self-aware only in the sense that made the book notorious on its first publication, with Mailer having cast himself in the third person as the protagonist of his own story, but self-aware in a more mischievous sense, with the author well aware of the notoriety that the “egocentric” choice will induce and delighted to risk the consequences. The promotion of author to picaresque hero here is more high-hearted than hubristic. Indeed, the humor and the self-awareness are two sides of the same effect, and central to what is, a half century later, the book’s enduring charm. “The Armies of the Night” is not a journalistic account of a protest so much as a satiric poem of fathers and sons. It tells of how one generation of American radicals confronted and comically misunderstood the next.
Hodgson’s book is a demonstration of how swimming pools are genetically photogenic. Perhaps it’s that a pool somewhat resembles a photograph: a field of glittering action, bordered by white. Or that before digital cameras, to develop a photograph meant to submerge it in a series of three pools—developer, stop bath, fixer. Or that both center around the joys of seeing—light dancing on water, bodies glowing in the sun. Photography might as well have been invented for swimming pools.
While another writer might give us a lengthy tour of this turbulent water, Levy doesn’t slow down. There’s joy in her maneuvering through the rapids, difficult though they may be. And there’s joy for us in watching her.
The EU could be seen not the way Poirier sees it, as Paris-created bulwark, but as sociologist Wolfgang Streeck envisioned it – a deregulation machine exposing its citizens to capitalism gone wild. I would argue that, were Sartre and De Beauvoir alive, they would share Streeck’s view. But let’s not leave Paris without yielding, just a little, to Poirier’s rose-tinted image of its charms. Interviewed for the book, Juliette Greco recalled evenings 60-odd years earlier, strolling with Miles Davis from jazz club to bistro, as their love blossomed. She was white, he black, she had no English, he no French. “I have no idea how we managed,” she laughed. “The miracle of love.” Or the miracle of Paris, which is much the same thing.