The book is true to its title: a smart, delicious, coming-of-age tale about a young woman already drunk on the idea of New York before her true education begins. And, yes, I devoured it. Better yet, the novel doesn’t flail at the end, the sinkhole of many writers, novice and veteran ... Sweetbitter is not a story of love but of lust and abandonment and thrashing about to satisfy appetite in inappropriate places. The triangle formed by Simone and Tess and Jake is bound for ruin. Rather than a romance, Danler has created something far more interesting: a sexy, sweaty book of sensory overload.
Stephanie Danler’s first novel, Sweetbitter, is the Kitchen Confidential of our time, written from the cleaner and infinitely more civilized front-of-the-house perspective...It would be a tired story if it weren’t so, well, for one thing true and for another so brilliantly written. A coked-out girl who sees the sun come up as many times as Tess does might cause her writer to run out of metaphors for unwelcome daybreak — 'a dagger of morning prowled outside the open windows,' 'sunrise came like an undisclosed verdict' — but Danler never does, and her description of the panic of the unannounced health department inspection was so engrossing to read, I missed a flight even though I had already checked in and was waiting at the gate.
Sweetbitter is a young person's novel, full of the joyful pain that comes from almost-having, a feeling like happiness that would disperse if the object were actually caught...When people mention purple writing, they mean something saturated and embarrassing: something that tries too hard, wants too much, doesn't play it cool. This is a book that tries hard, really hard in a way that is tempting to dismiss; it is voluptuous writing, ripe approaching 'the precipice of rot.' It balances on the edge of too much, too strong, too sentimental, too dramatic, too overdrawn or overwritten. But it works, because that is what it feels like to be young and in a big city: like it's too much, and at the same time not nearly enough.
The story of a waitress plucked from obscurity and launched into stardom is an old, clichéd tale, yet Danler’s novel is anything but. Instead, Sweetbitter is small but impressively polished, the rare much-hyped book that lives up to its billing: endearing yet unsentimental, smart and fun, a bildungsroman mercifully free of cliché.
t’s an unpretentious, truth-dealing, summer-weight novel — bought by Knopf in an attention-grabbing six-figure deal — that reads like a letter home from a self-deprecating friend...At the beginning there are gimmicky interpolated sections about things like the nature of sweet versus sour. You fear you may be headed into a genre fiction tunnel of love. Those fears are quickly dispelled. Ms. Danler is a gifted commenter (chilly autumn air in Manhattan 'tasted of steel knives and filtered water') on many things, class especially. An awareness of privilege runs through this novel like a tendon.
An endless roundelay of rivalries and crushes—she is enthralled by both a taciturn tattooed bartender named Jake and his best friend, Simone, a sophisticated older server—propel the story forward, though those intrigues ultimately resonate less than Tess’ sensual awakening to food: creamy, ash-dusted cheeses; anchovies drenched in olive oil; dense, fleshy figs like 'a slap from another sun-soaked world.' That’s the book’s true romance—the heady first taste of self-discovery, bitter and salty and sweet.
At first I wondered if Danler meant to satirize Tess’s self-involvement, a symptom of the sense of importance that young people often have. She doesn’t. This is a novel for those who like to think coming-of-age in New York is as poetic as the movies say it is. Tess is left to her own self-absorbed devices throughout the book ... characters are thinly drawn, so it’s hard for the reader to feel the same stake in their deceptions as Tess does ... In most novels, these problems with main characters would be insuperable obstacles, but Sweetbitter actually goes down very easily ... It’s a boon that unlike most food writers, Danler isn’t anxious to plaster over the experience with words. This allows the book to develop the atmosphere of sensuality she was clearly hoping to create. One only wishes it had been put to use to create a better, more inviting atmosphere.
A heady mix of youth, love, gastronomic delights and determined self-invention ... truthfully, you shouldn’t read Sweetbitter for its plot, which is admittedly weak. Instead, it’s the showstopping invention of Danler’s prose that takes center stage. There are staccato bursts of kitchen dialogue. Effortlessly, she moves from first person to second and back again. She gets the ebb and flow of work and customers and glittering New York City nightlife exactly right, down to vomiting on the subway stairs and a cockroach encased in ice ... But even with writing this gorgeous, there’s still that missing ingredient: story. Nothing in Tess’ interactions with others really surprises us or shows growth.
Ostensibly about the New York restaurant scene and the carnal pleasures of food — there are oysters sliding down throats, and the smell of fall apples, and the smoke and sting of booze going down (and coming back up) — the novel is actually concerned with appetite, the strategies Tess employs to satisfy it, those she consumes and decimates along the way...Danler can be a brilliant observer of the city; she can make dialogue snap; she is unafraid to give us a protagonist whose drive can be monstrous. But what is it that Tess wants?
Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter (Knopf)—boasting a confident first printing of 100,000 copies—dresses the bones of a classic coming-of-age story with the lusty flesh and blood of a bawdy early twenty-first century picaresque...[Tess's] insatiable hunger for tactile, sensual satisfaction dares you to tag along. The journey is high-minded and dirty, beastly and bountiful.
...a sometimes breathtaking, sometimes sordid and always beautifully written rabbit hole of food and drugs and sex and up-all-night and flavors and, eventually, another beginning ... Sweetbitter feels like an updated, female take on Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, but with a sensual additional layer ... Sweetbitter isn’t a book you read for its plot, but for the way Danler — in language that often approaches stream-of-consciousness — creates a time, a place, a feeling.
From the opening lines of Sweetbitter, it is clear that Stephanie Danler knows her craft. Both of her crafts, actually, because this debut novel relies as much on Ms. Danler’s knowledge of the New York restaurant world as it does on her ability to construct a sentence ... Ms. Danler’s commitment to aesthetics can’t mask Sweetbitter’s underlying weaknesses, perhaps because it is at its heart. Tess functions above all as a conduit for sensory experiences and an entry point into the world of the restaurant. The story, if anything, detracts ... because Sweetbitter is a series of impressions and uncertainties, whenever the story dips into cliche — as it especially tends to when it comes to Tess’ relationship with Jake — it’s hard not to doubt that there’s any substance to it at all ... It’s all too easy for stereotypes and cliches to dress up in beautiful prose and masquerade as a kind of insight.
...not only a dead-on depiction of a newcomer’s initial months in the Big Apple but a lush, hard-drinking-and-drugging and often sordid rendering of life behind the scenes of one of Manhattan’s most popular restaurants ... Danler knows what she is doing here – bringing us characters who don’t change in Tess’ maturing eyes and who might be workers in any large city in any close-knit industry with the novel’s seducer as much a place as a person.
