“The difference between a fact and a secret was the slithery phrase: ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 1, 2010)

Early on in Monique Truong’s powerful new novel, Bitter in the Mouth, the narrator, Linda Hammerick, realizes her family is keeping secrets from her. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two. Those were the last words that my grandmother ever said to me,” Linda recalls. It will take many more years before Linda can discover what those secrets are but before then she must navigate a strained childhood in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina.

As Truong reveals slowly over the course of the novel, Linda is different from the residents of Boiling Springs in many ways but there’s one specific condition that we find out about right away: Linda suffers from synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where different senses can overlap. Linda suffers from a specific one where spoken words coming at her yield various taste sensations in her mouth. For example, she forever associates her teen crush with the taste of orange sherbet. Needless to say, this is a crushing disability made worse by the fact that nobody in town—including her own parents—can really comprehend what’s wrong. “Many of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste—unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into my mouth,” Linda recalls, “On my report cards, my teachers conveyed this undetected fact to my parents as ‘your daughter’s unwillingness to pay attention in class.’”

As Linda works her way through school, she manages her “incomings” with other strong tastes—namely cigarettes and alcohol. By the time she graduates from Boiling Springs High School, she is close to smoking a pack a day.

Despite the synesthesia, Linda’s giftedness surfaces anyway and she is easily the brightest kid in school—the Brain. At school she has a best friend, Kelly, who is herself struggling with a poor self-image and later, an unplanned pregnancy.

Linda’s relationship with her family is strained. Her mother, DeAnne, is especially distant and it isn’t very clear until the end why she is so. When Linda tragically is raped by a local landscaper, she is horrified that the incident doesn’t really register with her mother. It is this seemingly chilling indifference that forever turns Linda off her home and family. The only family member she is very close to is her granduncle, Harper Evans Burch, known to the family as Baby Harper. In fact, it is Baby Harper who offers Linda the shoulder she needs when she goes through life’s many ups and downs.

Unmoored by slowly decaying family ties, Linda jumps at the first chance she gets to leave home. Like her father, Thomas Hammerick, she goes to Yale and studies law. “I hadn’t thought about my refusal to return to Boiling Springs as a habit, but it was. Like biting my fingernails or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, the act of not returning home had an ameliorative effect on my psyche,” Linda says. “It had begun with the idea, new and fizzy in my eighteen-year-old brain, that family was a choice and not fate. If that was true, then I chose not to have a family.” Soon Linda is settled in New York City working at a law practice, on her way to becoming junior partner, until tragedy strikes again.

She eventually returns to Boiling Springs and learns of the secrets from DeAnne. As much as this sounds like the stuff of melodrama, it is not. Monique Truong, whose debut was the sensational The Book of Salt, does a wonderful follow-up job with Bitter in the Mouth. Her writing is simply superb and she explores the weightiest of themes with ease.

The only problem with her new novel is that while the story might be completely different, the ground she covers here is not. The themes she explores in The Book of Salt are here again. This is not to imply that it diminishes Bitter in the Mouth as a novel in any way—but instead to say that one wishes the immensely talented Truong had taken some more risks and colored a little outside the lines. Evaluated by itself, Bitter in the Mouth is fantastic. But taken together with The Book of Salt, you don’t see much growth in the author’s range. Despite this minor quibble, it’s plenty evident that Monique Truong is extremely talented and her latest novel is an absolute delight.

One final thought about the book has not much to do with the book itself but with the timing of its release. Anybody who has been paying any kind of attention in the literary world is well aware of the release of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom on September 1. It’s just unfortunate that Bitter in the Mouth will be released exactly at this time. The immensely able Truong deserves loads more attention than she has received so far and the timing of this book’s release will, unfortunately, not help.

Bitter in the Mouth is an impressive feat especially given that her brilliant debut made it such a difficult act to follow. With her latest novel, Truong conclusively proves she’s no one-hit wonder.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 59 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Monique Truong
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Book of Salt Also consider: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Bibliography:

• The Book of Salt (2003)
• Bitter in the Mouth (2010)

Co-editor:

• Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (1998)

“I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth—always so active, alert—could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I hate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I’d use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively.

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (JUN 2, 2010)

Ever since the publication of her story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender has established herself as a writer of minimalist magic realism, a description that seems contradictory given the lush prose of the founding father of magic realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the emotional adjective-laden writing of popular American author Alice Hoffman. But Aimee Bender has claimed her niche as a writer who tells stories the way we pass on fairy tales to our children: spare plots that contain wondrous images and, ultimately, wisdom. Her plots center on one or two magic elements in an otherwise ordinary world. In her latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender focuses on narrator Rose, a girl who learns, to her horror, that she can taste the emotions of those who cooked or grew her food, whether that person is her desperate mother or the farmer who grew the organic lettuce in her salad. As Rose matures along with her “gift,” she learns about the peculiar history of her family and gains insight into her odd brother Joseph, who suffers, too, but in a wholly different manner.

Rose’s family is about as dysfunctional as a functional family can get. Her mother casts off a boring administrative job to follow a series of “hands-on experiments”—baking, growing strawberries, becoming a carpenter—designed to find the happiness she desperately craves, finding it at last in a secret affair that Rose discovers through the taste of dinner. Her father, a lawyer, hates hospitals so much that he refuses to be present at Rose’s and Joseph’s births or at any other family emergency that requires one. Joseph is the family’s reclusive genius and favorite child until it becomes apparent that his intelligence isn’t honed enough to escape from the oppression of the family; instead, he finds another way, with his own gift, an avenue that only Rose and his friend George can understand. Rose’s grandmother won’t visit them (and they don’t visit her), so she sends boxes of cast-off belongings that, on the surface, are junk, but which serve as a connection to her grandchildren. At the center of all this, Rose lives in quiet, underappreciated and largely unseen, a position which both hurts her and allows her to mature as Joseph cannot. What is most amazing is that Rose is able to detect emotions in a family that purports to have none.

The strength of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is not in its unusual premise or even its dissection of a crumbling family but rather in the way Rose’s emotions and insight build within the magic to illuminate the casual way we go about our lives without realizing how we might impact others. When Rose freaks out after tasting the unbearable sadness in her mother’s pie, her mother rushes Rose to the hospital instead of addressing and admitting the real problem: how her emotions are being passed on to her children. It’s no accident that the only characters who believe in Rose’s talents are well-adjusted individuals who want to be better at what they do.

Bender’s prose verges on the lyrical at times, with images that resonate without being flowery, but, for the most part, she writes in a straightforward manner, with a narrative voice that suggests a simplicity of purpose when the underlying currents are anything but. Rose is both storyteller and participant, and her voice reflects this dual role. While such a technique doesn’t create the intimacy expected of most first-person narratives, it does allow the extraordinary to fit into a more mundane reality. Rose is trustworthy, honest in her appraisals, the only one who could successfully guide the reader through the stages of her survival and the love she maintains, despite all, for her family.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 396 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Aimee Bender
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Willful Creatures

Bibliography:

• The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories (1998)
• An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000)
• Willful Creatures: Stories (August 2005)
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (June 2010)
• The Color Master: Stories (August 2013)

As Contributor:

• Land-Grant College Review (2003)
• Lit Riffs
• The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (June 2005)