...high-hearted and soulful ... In this novel, she weaves elaborate surreal elements...into a realistic narrative, replete with descriptions of Los Angeles weather patterns, the textures of vending-machine food and the byproducts of Rose's mother's study of woodworking ... Rose's nuanced responses to food mirror the emotional intensity of growing up in a Los Angeles family with its share of troublesome quirks ... Bender convinces us effortlessly that by the time Rose is a high school graduate, she can tell the terroir of the ingredients in food she eats ... And she concludes this virtuoso performance with a flourish by showing us a surprising yet somehow inevitable future, where Rose's particular gift brings its own rewards.
For those willing to experiment a little, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake doesn’t tread even remotely on the same emotional territory as Like Water For Chocolate (another book that combined food, magic, and a really unhappy cook) ... Bender doesn’t go in for florid flourishes or passionate writing; her territory is the unspoken unhappiness of a 20th-century, middle-class family ... Her 1980s California world is a very recognizable one of suburbs, buses, and overworked school nurses. If anything, Bender does less with food than one would expect of a novel whose main character’s emotional world is bound up in the sense of taste ... There’s an evocative power in Bender’s work that lingers with a reader.
Bender is the master of quiet hysteria. At times, it seems almost cruel, like she uses her talent to create anxiety willfully. She builds pressure sentence by sentence ... Bender has inherited at least three profound strains, three genetic codes or lines of inquiry from her forebears in American literature. There’s the Faulknerian loneliness, the isolation that comes from our utter inability, as human beings, to truly communicate with each other; the crippling power of empathy (how to move forward when everyone around you is in pain) that is so common in our literature it’s hard to attach a name to it, and the distance created by humor, a willfully devil-may-care attitude that allowed, for example, Mark Twain to skip with seeming abandon around serious issues like racism and poverty ... Void of sentiment and high drama, bleached clean of mystery and even metaphor, it’s about daily life that is increasingly impossible to navigate yet moving always forward.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is magical, but it is not magic realism. It is more robust than that. There is dream logic, and there is waking logic, and in Bender's fiction, the two co-operate. They swirl. The result is a hybrid of dream and reality so seamless and persuasive that you will realize (or remember) that you, too, have lived your life on the outskirts of Hollywood, a few blocks south of Sunset ... Bender gives you the three dimensions plus the two we hide behind. You love the cartoon family. You love the fairy tale. But when Bender pulls aside the curtain and shows you the dark swirling truth, you cannot look away. You feel - that rare and beautiful gift from a truly great book - woken up and unalone.
Bender takes a clever idea and runs with it as well as can be expected, being more focused on how one particular life-changing event affects her protagonist rather than on its repercussions for the wider world ... It's frightening at times, rewarding at others, layering a rich tapestry of wonder and fright over her life, one that Bender renders with an exquisitely textured language. The book veers into a sort of foodie emotional nirvana at times -- one can imagine lovers of the Eat, Pray, Love school of writing desperately pining for Rose's ability to merge tastebuds and emotion -- and it ruins no surprise to tell that she eventually finds work in a kitchen ... For Bender, it's not the knowing why something has come about which seems important, but the witnessing how one comes through it that matters.
Had the novel focused only on this imaginative food conceit, it would have been merely clever - but Bender is too good a writer for that. She uses Rose's secret burden as a means of exploring the painful limits of empathy, the perils of loneliness, and Rose's deeply dysfunctional family ... The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake takes a darker turn in its latter half, as the Edelsteins begin to unravel in their own private ways ... Few writers are as adept as Bender at mingling magical elements so seamlessly with the ordinary ... Depending on your expectations, it will be either disappointing or apt that these troubled characters slip quietly offstage rather than exiting with huge, dramatic transformations.
It seemed to me at first more like the seed of one of those fantastical tales than a premise that could sustain a longer narrative. But actually, it does even more than that: Attached to a gorgeous, devastating coming-of-age story, Bender’s descriptions of how feelings and flavors mingle manages to be some of the most sumptuous, original—and really, personal—food writing I’ve ever read ... She’s also not really interested in the rather fascinating implications of what could be understood as an eating disorder, barely describing the state of Rose’s body, or the character’s own sense of it. Instead, Bender cares about how we live with food, and through it: the subtle dramas behind a toasted bagel overwhelmed by cream cheese, the mind-bending Neapolitan pizza from the swanky new restaurant, a stale bag of chips, a berry crisp warm from the oven.
Over the course of the novel and Rose’s life, the predicament continues, building to an unwanted fixation of what constitutes food and those who make it, from the factories and farms to the lives and longings of the preparers ... Aimee Bender mixes hyper-realism with magical realism like no other contemporary fiction writer. Experimental in style, her prose has always combined incendiary qualities (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) with the painstakingly mundane ... The elements of the novel are straightforward: the plot is told in three parts; the characters are clearly defined, and they deepen as the protagonist ages; the setting is an ironically lush and light-filled Southern California ... It is to Bender’s credit that Rose’s trials feel somewhat universal for a character whose supernatural power quickly gives way to dark revelations.
Aimee Bender’s writing style is one that is clipped; words often appear to be missing from sentences, from paragraphs, from pages. Maybe the words are missing because in this imaginary world humans simply don’t understand each other—relatives or strangers—and therefore are not competent about talking, listening, responding ... There must be an intended message buried somewhere in this 292-page novel that I missed. After its charming opening pages, Lemon Cake seemed to immediately bog down. It read more like a novella or an overly extended short story than a true novel.
Taking her very personal brand of pessimistic magical realism to new heights (or depths), Bender’s second novel careens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses ... Bender has been called a fabulist, but emerges as more a spelunker of the human soul; carefully burrowing through her characters’ layered disorders and abilities, Bender plumbs an emotionally crippled family with power and authenticity. Though Rose’s gift can seem superfluous at times, and Bender’s gustative insights don’t have the sensual potency readers might crave, this coming-of-age story makes a bittersweet dish, brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent.
