Julie/Julia ...and Me

Well, I did it. I broke down, bought Julie Powell's Julie/Julia and read it. How could I not? After all the fuss that has been made about it (not all particularly complimentary) I had to see for myself - and I make no bones about my curiousity or my lack of willpower when it comes to holding out against the double-barreled velocity of marketing and media (after all, when it comes right down to it, I'm one of those marketing/media people anyway).

But back to the book. If you can call it that. It reads like a copy of some excessively long, intermittently coherent email. Then again, I suppose that may also be appropriate given the book's origin as a blog.

The thing that frustrated me, aside from Powell's brazen narcissism and arrogantly undeserved comparisons of herself to, say, Samuel Pepys (more on that in a moment) and Julia Child herself, was her ability to denigrate philosophically beautiful acts of human existence, like cooking, learning and self-discovery, into something so disgustingly messy (not unlike the decriptions of her dust and cat-hair-blanketed apartment...). Something that, presented in combination with meandering mastications on her friends' sex lives, was at times almost viscerally unappealing.

Granted, not all cooking is beautiful - or fun. Meat preparation, for instance, can be downright primal. But somehow in her efforts to hit the reader over the head with the "deeper significance" of preparing food, she loses sight of what it's all about -- offering, instead, highly contrived, overly self-conscious commentary about brains or, as at the beginning, extracting marrow from a bone.

Now I'm no starry-eyed, rose-coloured-glasses Bergdorf Blondes-and-Nanny Diaries Modern Girl -- there's enough Bridget Jones-meets-Carrie Bradshaw cynicism in me to last a good long while -- but please, if you're going to expound upon the pleasures of food, my god can you at least be articulate about it? And try to sound as if you're enjoying yourself at least some of the time?

What Powell has created with Julie/Julia is the unfortunate result of a good idea taken too far. A blog, sure. A column? Fine. But a la Sex in the City, which did nothing in book form half as well as it did on HBO or in the Post, Julie/Julia the book suffers from a variety of ailments (perhaps Powell would call it a "syndrome"?). Not least the author's inability to write - a fact she bravely attempts to mask with allusions to as many literary and culinary greats as she can deliberately make room for - regardless, it seems, of whether or not they do anything for the book.

Case in point, the random references to the diary of Samuel Pepys, Powell's own reference to her reader as "best beloved" (a forthright self-comparison with Rudyard Kipling) and her rather bizarre effort at reconstructing the love affair between Paul and Julia Child in a secondary narrative that falls so far short of its goal the editor who let get as far as the galley stage ought to be shot -- and Powell ought never be allowed to take up fiction.

Powell's prose is contorted, long-winded and as syntactically self-serving and navel-gazing as the book itself. Not to mention so stuffed with fat (of the verbose kind) that it fairly cooks itself. And now, god forbid, she's calling herself a writer. But as I am sure she would have to agree, one recipe does not a Master of French Cooking make. And one book does not an author make.

By the way, if you just have to buy it, I'll sell you my copy at a discount. Either that, or there are probably more than a few copies lying around at your local used book store.