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Einstein's Beets

de Alexander Theroux

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Alexander Theroux's Einstein's Beets is an astonishingly original and monumental study on this enigmatic subject - the world of food and food aversions. Theroux explicates the inexplicable and often weird preoccupations of food aversions, unique among the thousands of books a year dealing with food. What more reveals what we are than food - the fuel by which we move, the resource by which we grow?… (més)
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Despite its subtitle, Einstein’s Beets is not really an examination or treatise on food phobias – no footnotes, no copyright pages. Editing seems to be minimal; particularly annoying is that long quotations are sometimes indented and in a different font, but more often not. Food aversion here is like a familiar – we all have ‘em – musical phrase used by a jazz musician to create an individual artistic expression. A.T. is the John Coltrane of aversion rant. What holds it together and makes it more than an 800 page blog of gossipy snark?
Possibly it’s a meditation on human freedom from a Christian, probably Roman Catholic, point of view. If I recall correctly, the author, a novelist, poet, and academic – his better known brother is novelist & travel writer Paul Theroux -- in his younger days considered joining a religious order. In that case, Einstein’s Beets is a kind of spiritual autobiography hidden behind a gourmand Aubrey’s Brief Lives, an encyclopedic collection of curious food facts, fallacies, and poisonous pen portraits, with a range of allusion encompassing popular art (Family Guy, The Simpsons), celebrity culture (Lindsay Lohan, Audrey Hepburn, Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey), and high culture (Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare) as well as the middlebrow culture of my youth (Holiday Magazine, Playboy Interviews).
For example, with regard to vegetable bete noires, in the span of a few pages, he cites Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Maya Angelou on eggplant phobia, Jim Carrey, Fran Lebowitz, Tom Selleck, Will Rogers, and chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli contra carrots, and Rosie O’Donnell’s aversion to zucchini. Denis Diderot disliked potatoes, while Shakespeare’s John Falstaff considered them to be Elizabethan viagra. Oh, and Russell Baker hated French fries but Julie Andrews’s comfort food is American milkshakes and “the occasional boiled potato sandwich.”
The abbreviated survey above also has a couple of examples of A.T.’s mean streak. Often it appears that his aversion for certain people can overwhelm the examination of their phobias. Maya Angelou is “one of the worst writers on earth.” Rosie O’Donnell may not care for zucchini, but “fattier foods she adores … her weight has at times ballooned to 300 pounds … after her son, Parker got into an accident, she scarfed down three boxes of Mallomars … When a recent online survey asked people to write in, guessing what Rosie O’Donnell’s favorite foods were, several people wrote ‘Plankton and krill.’”
This leads me to consider whether the “Alexander Theroux” of Einstein’s Beets could be a Charles Kinbote character, the nutcase who hijacks the commentary of Pale Fire. This would be a meta-irony, since Nabokov is one of the author’s bugaboos. Apparently. One can’t help be struck by what a troll the author character is, an extraordinary hater! He is surely the least charitable of Christians. To paraphrase Alice Roosevelt, if you can’t say something nice … Well hello Mr. Theroux! The subjects of his rants – Nabokov, Gore Vidal, A.J. Liebling, Joan Didion, Andy Warhol, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Ariel Sharon, and most of the Food Channel hosts -- anyway, the victims -- often become the author character’s unconscious descriptions of his own personality. (Then again he does note that chefs, fellow creative artists, have their own food phobias.)
For example, regarding the despised Jim Harrison: “Can you imagine this guy sitting next to you on a long bus ride and blabbing away across the endless miles? Hand me my Dramamine.” On Thoreau’s self-portrait, A.T. sees an analogy with Confederacy of Dunces Ignatius D. Reilly, ”a sanctimonius eccentric.” “Nabokov loved to pontificate on every fact and phase of life, making lordly pronouncements from on high.” “What was arid, bare, barren, bleak, deserted, insincere, manufactured, unnatural, and desolate invariably pleased Warhol.” He notes that Thomas Aquinas condemned the sin of gluttony with philosophical subtlety, while being enormously fat, so maybe A.T. is aware of some of the ironies.
Exceptionally, none of the objects of his Biblical wrath (he seems to consider the New Testament to be literal history) comes out as anti-Semitic. “Theroux” seems to have reserved it all for himself. Initially you get suburban anti-Semitism – every Jewish personality is outed with his or her former name (but no one Italian, Greek, or any other ethnics, to the best of my recollection).By the end of the book you get digressions on the kosher tax and the Zionist media. “Kinbote/Theroux” is unable to write about the Nazi treatment of the Jews without going off on Gaza and the West Bank; Sylvia Plath is quoted to snipe at Jewish self-dramatization of the Holocaust, not to mention a passing sneer at Anne Frank. As the spiritual, presumably In Real Life Theroux explains, aversion and phobias are how we negatively assert our freedom. I’m not sure if Theroux is implying an aversion to broccoli is metaphysically equivalent to America First and other expressions of ethnic phobia. To me, it puts his progressive Christianity in a bad light. One of the few Jews who comes out unscathed is secular Leopold Bloom, whose charitable perspective contrasts with the judgmental Christian author. (Could be why a former M.I.T. professor and well-received novelist’s latest has a publisher that ordinarily does Peanuts reprints?).
Anyway, the 800 pages go by quickly; snark can be very entertaining, as is the author’s eggplant to plankton ADD. While the ambiguity of perspective – Theroux IRL or Kinbote/Theroux – gives it more depth, my recollection is that the earlier Darconville’s Cat was tighter and better, and the religious strain more humane, but now I’m afraid to go back and re-read it and, like many memories, be disappointed. For brilliant combining of high and low culture I recommend S.J. Perelman, for literary wit Joseph Epstein (before he started to become overtly right wing), for virtuoso lists John Barth in The Sot Weed Factor, for sly humor The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and, as already noted, for encyclopedic word and world building, Ulysses. ( )
1 vota featherbear | Jun 25, 2017 |
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Alexander Theroux's Einstein's Beets is an astonishingly original and monumental study on this enigmatic subject - the world of food and food aversions. Theroux explicates the inexplicable and often weird preoccupations of food aversions, unique among the thousands of books a year dealing with food. What more reveals what we are than food - the fuel by which we move, the resource by which we grow?

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