Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Julie Powell tries in her second book to show the world that she has an important voice of her own--that she can do more than ride on the coat-tails of greater talents that have gone before her. So it is a far from encouraging sign that she starts by stealing a title--double entendre and all--from another memoir published not ten years earlier ("Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage," by Dennis and Vicki Covington). Perhaps she has a better claim to the pun, as she alternates vignettes of apprenticing at a butcher shop and the near-destruction of her marriage. But what is the point of all these boudoir to abattoir smash cuts? They lose their shock value fast. If she has some spark of an idea about meat being meat, or butchery resonating with infidelity, it is nothing more than a spark: gone in an instant, yielding neither light nor heat. Nothing connects the disjointed elements of the book except that they all happened to the author. As Churchill is supposed to have said, "This pudding has no theme." The education of a butcher, the confessions of an adulterer, the bizarre lurch into travel writing late in the book...nothing binds it together into an appetizing whole. You'd think she'd have gotten the point of stews after making all that Boeuf Bourguignon and Coq au Vin in the last book. Oh, and the recipes, randomly strewn in there because...well, why not, I guess. We had pork chops that night so here's a recipe for them. It makes no more sense than anything else in here, but at least it makes no less. (To see this kind of thing done right, try John Lanchester's "The Debt to Pleasure.") The details of the craft of butchery--reducing things that are still recognizably animals into those lovely steaks and roasts and so forth--are interesting. There might have been a good magazine article in there. But it's nothing to really ponder or ruminate on or share with a friend: no David Foster Wallace reporting from the lobster festival. (And I regret spending my time on this when more than one person has recommended to me Bill Buford's 2006 memoir "Heat," as an example of _this_ kind of thing done right.) And as to the murky reaches of the human heart, how two people can inflict such pain on each other, live in such misery, and yet be unable to just call it off, well, I sure hope you weren't looking for any kind of insight. Stuff happens: that's about as deep as it gets. An old flame calls up and a two year affair begins, because...well, it just does. Powell moves out for a while, and moves back in. The flame: breakup, reunion, breakup, and round we go. At one point, pork chops are cooked. Then things seem to more or less work themselves out. The trouble is that there's far more to profundity than honesty. Powell doesn't seem to have an idea of why she or anyone else does anything--everything takes place in a foggy land of the passive voice. Perhaps there's no way to expect her to have a perspective to share: it's all too fresh, too traumatic. But that leaves us with nothing much in the "affair" passages but the catharsis of unloading it all...and the primal scream therapy is just wearying long before even the halfway mark. There is one moment that comes close to something important, in what has already become an infamous scene of the author having sex with a stranger, but then the moment is gone. A paragraph or two hinting at what could have been a far more disturbing, but also profound and meaningful work. Not for the sex--for the glimpse into the author's psyche. But a glimpse is all you get. I would like to say that even though I don't think "Cleaving" is a very good book, it has received a lot of unwarranted criticism, largely from people who wanted this to be a sequel to the feel-good biopic largely based on Julia Child's "My Life in France" (which is a really _good_ memoir), but taking its title and most of its popcorn-break moments from Powell's "Julie and Julia." These people seem to think that "Cleaving" is a bad book because Julie Powell is a bad person. I don't think they could be any more wrong on that point. Does "Othello" fail as art because Iago is a bad person? No. "Cleaving" fails because it, ultimately, has nothing important to say. Just sound and fury, people. Sound and fury.