It’s the thought that counts, we say of gifts, and with books, well, there’s a whole lot of thought—six hours? twelve?—required to truly appreciate one. If it was a sweater, Dear Friend could immediately try it on to check the size, then later wear it once in my presence, good and settled. Even if the sweater was all wrong, in style or material, I wouldn’t object to its being exchanged. It’s a nice sweater, but it never changed my life.
With the book, I’m giving Dear Friend, I hope, much more than a gift.
Imagine setting aside a wheel of cheese at your wedding. What would it look like if it were served at your funeral?
If you were lucky, it would look like one of the wheels in Jean-Jacques Zufferey’s basement in Grimentz, Switzerland: shriveled and brown, pockmarked from decades of mite and mouse nibbles, and hard as a rock. You’d need an axe to slice it open and strong booze to wash it down. This is the rare cheese you don’t want to cut into when it’s aged to perfection. A fossilized funeral cheese means you lived a long life.
By finding such vivid forms to express the variously fast and slow violences plaguing the residents of Natoma, Fire in the Canyon hammers home how, in Ada’s words, “[t]his is a new situation we’re all in. We need to adjust how we do things.” Now, the question becomes exactly how to adjust, especially when so much time and effort (literally the stuff of hundreds of pages) might ultimately amount to nothing. Gumbiner offers no answers—only urgency. If one thing’s for certain, it’s that, like the damage smoke does to the lungs, crises of this kind will only build over time.
Harvey’s purpose, as a novelist, isn’t to teach the science of space travel. She does provide intricate detail about, for instance, how the station’s drinking water gets recycled from everyone’s urine, or how “the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters.” Yet these elaborations — note the words “recycled” and “always-awake” — have less to do with the machinery of the station than they do with the orbiting minds of the humans on board.
Vogler hasn’t called her book Stuffed to signal the amazing array of facts she has gathered – though on this score it is, indeed, brimful (I’m in awe of her reading). The word can mean utterly screwed as well as swollen-stomached in the post-buffet sense, and thanks to this it’s entirely apt for a study of British food in good times and in bad.