The opening pages of C Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, think about a planet dealing with disaster after disaster—an extension of our personal. Local weather change has devastated the land: the Earth is roofed in smog; crops have withered; nations are caving to famine. Zhang joins quite a lot of different writers who’ve not too long ago used their work to ask the way to reside in a dying world. However her curiosity is extra pointed: She appears to be asking how we would nonetheless discover pleasure amid collapse—and whether or not it’s ethical to take action when so many are simply making an attempt to outlive.
The novel’s narrator is an unnamed 29-year-old American chef working in England who finds herself trapped when the U.S. closes its borders as smog spreads and geopolitical tensions rise. On the identical day that she receives discover that her late mom’s condominium in Los Angeles has burned down in a riot, her boss cuts pesto from the restaurant’s menu as a result of there’s no extra basil, “not even the powdered type.” Zhang splices the 2 occasions collectively in the identical breath, suggesting that for the chef, they’re equally important. She pays lip service to the famine’s severity in Southeast Asia and the Americas, and debates over which superpower is most responsible. However what she actually appears to mourn is the disappearance of peridot grapes and buttery mangoes and “the bitter inexperienced of endive.”
Even disaster, we’re reminded, is bookended by the wants of the current, interrupted by the cravings of 1’s palate. All through, Zhang, who wrote the novel after her first transformative post-pandemic meal at a restaurant, employs meals as a stand-in for gratification (at one level, her central character refers to strawberries “as yielding as a lady’s internal thigh”).
Lastly, after being requested to cook dinner with gritty, grey mung-protein flour, the narrator quits: “Within the dimness of that refrigerated room I may now not see a future for the halibut dish with out pesto.” As a result of she will now not take her beloved elements or daylight or clear air with no consideration, she decides to permit herself to need “recklessly, immorally” by taking a job as a non-public chef in a gated European mountaintop group of the ultra-wealthy. Her new employer and his enigmatic daughter, Aida, a scientist who runs the group’s biodiversity labs, are attempting to protect the richness of the Earth for the stomachs of the few, resurrecting Berkshire pigs and engineering tender heirloom grains. When she arrives on the Italian-French border, the narrator learns that the place is known as Terra di latte e miele—“the land of milk and honey”—and that her position is to arrange elaborate meals for traders.
By C Pam Zhang
By imagining the planet stretched to close destruction, Zhang poses advanced questions on self-interest. She asks the reader to contemplate how significant particular person habits truly is when the setting continues to decay, no matter whether or not one tries to do the best factor. The chef, after turning into unmoored by the lack of her mom’s residence, accepts the twisted, transactional association of her job on the mountain, in addition to the consolation and bounty it affords her; life’s difficulties have already begun to erode her urge for food for morality. She prepares trial runs of elaborate meals, discarding kilos of pommes dauphine and pouring out gallons of steaming Armagnac, at the same time as she thinks about ravenous kids. When her employer asks her to faux to be his lacking spouse on the dinners he hosts to fund the mountain, she agrees—in change for extra money. As she thinks at one level, “What … is equity in a world that fears there may be by no means sufficient, through which one want all the time scrapes in opposition to one other?”
And so the chef decides to embrace the privileges of her life on the mountain, falling in love with Aida within the course of. Whilst she turns into increasingly more powerless—her employer calls for that she keep her body-mass index inside a sure vary and stay silent at dinners—she realizes that each one she will safe is her personal sensual pleasure. Because the chef and Aida turn out to be romantically intertwined and start to spend every evening collectively, she decides to say sure: “to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that be part of on the legs the place she softened, dimpled, begged me to chunk.”
In these depictions, Zhang’s writing skates between prose and poetry, balancing the haziness of emotion with the grounding of element. In some situations, the heaviness of her sentences can tip a passage out of stability or make the story more durable to observe. However it’s deeply refreshing to see plot deliberately forged in a supporting position, accentuating the primacy of feeling:
Three years, are you able to think about, grey days and grey nights, no lovers no household no feasts no flights no fruit no meat and out of the blue this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free … Towards a still-dark sky, this emergent panorama of her physique. Lunar dunes, slick valleys, her throat a shifting topography.
In permitting her narrator to desert herself to want, Zhang appears to be arguing that pleasure is a necessary a part of life—and of survival. Our want is what makes us human; we don’t stop wanting simply because it’s egocentric or futile. Nowhere is that this made clearer than within the chef’s relationship with Aida. As the 2 turn out to be entangled, the chef grows much less involved in regards to the hypocrisies she witnesses on the mountaintop.
When depicting these tensions, the novel can really feel preachy, distracting from Zhang’s in any other case mesmerizing prose. Aida, for example, hosts a looking social gathering throughout which the traders kill off a species of chimp that she has determined shouldn’t be price preserving. The chef berates Aida; she is shocked by this merciless show, given how protecting Aida is of the animals in her labs. In response, Aida spits again, “Please. As if you happen to by no means ate tuna, or used plastics, or flew on planes when fuel was artificially low cost. Each individual on this planet had a hand in killing the chimps.”
However regardless of a number of the novel’s unsubtle moments, it’s unattainable, in most situations, to decipher the narrator’s ethical stance—and, extra essential, how the reader ought to really feel about her. Towards the top of the guide, she decides to surrender her spot on the mountain after Aida hits a toddler together with her automobile whereas they’re driving again from Milan. When Aida’s father pays off the kid’s household, Aida’s limp complacency breaks one thing within the chef’s thoughts: “I wished her guts to twist, her abdomen to revolt.”
The chef’s determination to go away and surrender her relationship with Aida, nevertheless, stands in distinction with how fondly she remembers her time on the mountain within the remaining pages of the guide. Right here, Zhang resists devolving into an overwrought critique of local weather catastrophe and particular person greed—a restraint that feels in step with her earlier work. How A lot of These Hills Is Gold, her debut novel, equally incorporates a feminine narrator who prioritizes her personal pursuits—in her case, monetary stability, beaded white sneakers, an exquisite residence. The facility of Zhang’s work is that she cares extra about her characters’ motivations and yearnings than about evaluating their actions as proper or flawed. The moral ambiguities of the guide are paralleled by the narrator’s murky recollection of Aida’s face: “plastered up many times until it grew to become clean and unusual, a cipher with none that means.”
Zhang’s second novel is a daring encouragement to dwell inside our wishes, even when we in the end resolve that the results don’t justify the pursuit. Her message is an addendum to the 2 stark phrases—“she desires”—that ended her first novel. Now she appears to be saying: She desires in order that she could reside.
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