→ September 20, 2007
→ By

Cleveland eats.

Not much for good eats in downtown Cleveland, unfortunately, but the real overriding theme was mediocre service. I’m not saying bad service, or rude service, just a lot of indifferent service.

First meal was at Fat Fish Blue, at the corner of Prospect and Ontario, serving a sort-of Cajun menu – sort of because they’ve supplemented a lot of Cajun classics with some other dishes more befitting a casual-dining chain. I stuck with the classics and was one for two. The chicken-and-sausage gumbo was a disappointment; the flavor was OK, with a lot of andouille, but the gumbo was thin (meaning that the roux was underdeveloped), and the bowl was about 1/3 gumbo and 2/3 overcooked and not-all-that-hot rice. The shrimp po’boy, on the other hand, was almost dead-on, with the only flaw being the cook’s failure to scoop out the doughy part of the French bread, which is de rigueur for an authentic po’boy. The fried shrimp were perfectly breaded (cornmeal with a little black pepper) and not even a little bit greasy, and the remoulade on the po’boy was delicious, although mayonnaise is more traditional.

Breakfast the next morning was at the Inn at Coventry, which won the Citysearch readers’ poll this year for Cleveland’s best breakfast. It’s a good value, but the food didn’t blow me away. The best thing I had was their popular “blues and chews” pancake, with blueberries and cashews; they get bonus points because you can order just one cake as a side. The pancake was a little flat but had a great butter flavor. The eggs etc. were all ordinary. This was, however, the best service I received at any restaurant on the trip.

For lunch on Wednesday I decided to hit Lola, the downtown restaurant by Michael Symon and I’d say one of the two best-known (to outsiders) restaurants in Cleveland at the moment. Lola offers kicked-up comfort food, and they have a lunch menu with a great you-pick-two option. I went with a chickpea salad and a chicken-salad sandwich on flatbread, and both were very good. The salad included chickpeas, rocket (okay, arugula, but “rocket” sounds so much better), yellow onions, and a few julienned pieces of japalenos; the chickpeas were a little undercooked, and the whole thing was overdressed, but the taste combination was excellent. The sandwich was served on a fresh pita; the chicken salad was slightly spicy (curry powder, perhaps) and it included pickled onions and julienned red peppers. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. So here’s my mediocre-service story: I sat at the bar and asked for sparkling water to drink, which is my usual. The bartender doesn’t tell me that they only sell it in liter bottles, and I end up paying $5 for just one glass of the stuff.

Wednesday’s dinner was at Zócalo, a pseudo-Mexican restaurant right across from Lola. I knew I was in trouble when the chips and salsa came and the chips were glittering with grease. The entree was no better. Avoid.

Thursday’s breakfast was a small adventure; I walked to the Second Street Diner only to find that it no longer exists, so I wandered back over to Euclid and went to Sammy’s, a little lunch-counter/greasy spoon tucked in the National City building. I went for an EMPT, and while the bacon (already mostly cooked, just reheated to order) and potatoes were nothing special, the short-order cook takes his egg-scrambling very seriously. He has a tiny metal bowl and a two-tine fork just for the purpose, and when he scrambles the eggs, he gets his whole body into it. The eggs were perfectly cooked, soft, fluffy, but totally cooked through. And it’s just nice to find the occasional place that still cooks eggs to order.

I picked up a sandwich to go from the Juniper Grille, and when I said I was there to order something to go, the waitress who greeted me immediately changed her whole demeanor to make it clear I was a second-class citizen. The turkey club wrap was good and came with potato chips that tasted like they were fried in-house, but I was left with something of a bitter taste from the way that waitress and another one inside treated me.

Last bite before I left was the Strickland’s frozen custard at the Jake. I’m a big frozen custard fan, since it usually has an ultra-smooth texture, but this stuff was a little icy and grainy.

Filed Under: Food
→ September 18, 2007
→ By

Empire Falls.

The moral of this story is that I need to listen to my readers when they recommend a book, because they’re two for two so far. The most recent successful suggestion is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

The book’s jacket describes Russo as a “compassionate” writer, which sounds like something that some halfwit in marketing came up with after reading two or three pages of the book, but it turns out to be an incredibly apt description of the way Russo creates and develops his characters. Empire Falls is set in a declining mill town in Maine, and the plot centers on the slightly hapless Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, father of a teenaged daughter, en route to a divorce from his longtime wife Janine, who is leaving him for Walt Comeau, the “Silver Fox” who owns the local gym and is forever challenging Miles to an arm-wrestle. His daughter, Tick, is having her own troubles, including an ex-boyfriend with anger issues, a classmate with a terrible family life and who never speaks, and difficulty dealing with her parents’ divorce, which she squarely blames on her mother. And Russo has populated the town with a number of other characters, all surprisingly well developed despite limited screen time, from Miles’ kleptomaniac father, Max, to the young and possibly gay Catholic priest Mark, to the omnipresent town matriarch, Francine Whiting, who has Miles and perhaps the rest of the community by the balls. Yet with perhaps the sole exception of that last character, everyone in the book is presented with some degree of compassion or at least understanding – people are shaped by their circumstances, some of which are beyond their control, and while many people manage to overcome disadvantageous backgrounds, it’s too easy just to pile blame on those who can’t or won’t.

The story revolves around Miles Roby’s divorce and some of the events in his life that the arrival of the actual legal event (as opposed to the end of his marriage, which happened some time prior to the book’s opening) sets in motion. He has spent twenty years of his life at the restaurant, forever awaiting the day when Francine Whiting will give him the restaurant, probably through her death, which doesn’t seem all that imminent. Russo tells Miles’ story through intermittent flashbacks and changes in perspective, revealing in stages the history of the Whitings, Miles’ family history, and even some of the stories behind the other characters. And since the town is so small, all of the stories intersect at multiple points with other stories, characters run into other characters, and in very thin sheets Russo gives us more and more details on each of them.

The book also reads as an allegorical history of small-town New England, which is dotted with slumping or failing former mill towns that have never really recovered from the end of the area’s textile industry. Empire Falls residents continue to cling to hopes that the mill will re-open and that those who remained will get their old jobs back, remembering, perhaps, good old days that weren’t all that good, and that aren’t coming back even if the town does find a new industry.

The story finally turns in its last fifty or so pages on the one real event of the book, the external stimulus that shocks Miles out of his emotional stupor. It was foreshadowed for a while in the book, but Russo handled it deftly and quickly, almost as if he disdained writing about action when he had dialogue and introspection to write.

A couple of quick notes:

  • This is the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that I’ve read, and it’s been a mixed bag. Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird are among my favorite novels, but Independence Day was disappointing, and I thought The Shipping News managed the twin feat of being vulgar and uninteresting.
  • I was helping out at the Tepper School of Business’s table at an MBA recruiting event on Sunday, and had my copy of Empire Falls sitting on the table. One prospective student noticed it hidden behind a sign, pointed, and just said, “Great book.” Turns out he’s a Mainer and thought that Russo did a fantastic job of capturing the culture of the state’s small towns.
Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 14, 2007
→ By

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

So I’ve gotten hooked on a BBC show (seen on BBC America on DirecTV) called Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The commercials originally sold me on it because it looked comical, but it’s more than just funny. The premise is that foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is invited to visit certain failing restaurants around the UK (invited by the restaurants’ owners, that is) and spend a week there to try to straighten them out. Needless to say, these restaurants are universally – to borrow one of Ramsay’s favorite expressions – in the shit. The food is usually horrendous. The menus are overcomplicated and overlong. The kitchens are terribly run, and often not even clean.

The episode I caught last night – “Clubway 41” – was one of the more shocking ones. The Blackpool restaurant had won an award as the best restaurant in the town from the local tourism board, but Ramsay found the food disgusting, from the salmon, strawberry, and watercress salad to the pork medallions in a brie and nectarine sauce with parsnip crisps (which Gordon managed to bend in half without breaking). It turns out that the chef had gone to culinary school in the 1970s and hadn’t been in a kitchen since, leading to a rough exchange between Ramsay and the chef where Ramsay airs him out for his inability to perform basic cooking tasks like making a casserole or cooking mussels. Ramsay went back several months later, only to find that they’d cancelled their dinner service after just eight weeks; he tries to relaunch it based around simple-to-cook comfort foods and short-order meals, but the restaurant appears to have closed not long after that. There was some controversy over this episode, as the chef-owner and the tourism board both took issue with how they were depicted, but I find it hard to be sympathetic to a chef who clearly can’t cook and who admits that the food on the night of the first relaunch was prepared by the TV show’s chefs, not by himself.

I just find the fact that these complete kitchen incompetents think they can run a restaurant kitchen amazing, and the lack of common sense on the part of most of these owners and chefs – like the one owner who wouldn’t pay her chef for prep time and bought all ingredients at the local Tesco – provides for a lot of unintentional comedy. And the best news of all is that there’s a U.S. version coming, debuting Wednesday night at 9 pm on Fox, just called Kitchen Nightmares, with at least one controversy already underway. If you like cooking, the restaurant business, or f-bombs, I highly recommend you watch it.

Filed Under: Cooking, Media Tagged With:
→ September 8, 2007
→ By

Salt.

Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History is something of a must-read for culinary buffs, whether your interest in food is in cooking it or merely in the eating thereof. Kurlansky does a solid job of explaining how the history of civilization, both in the West and several countries in Asia, has been directed and altered by the search for and use of salt.

The word “salt” actually refers to more than just sodium chloride, although that is the salt that plays the largest role in the book. A salt is one of two products of the reaction between an acid and a base – the other being water – and several other salts make appearances in Salt. Ancient Egyptians recognized that there were real differences between various salts, even if they didn’t understand the chemical compositions; natron, a naturally-occurring compound containing sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and sodium chloride, was used in mummification as well as in curing foods. Different types of culinary salts often served as measures of status, and the drive for whiter and whiter salt up until the last twenty years serves as a stark contrast to today’s marketing of pricier gourmet salts like French grey salt, black salt, and alaea red salt.

Salt also drove a number of scientific and technological advances. The curing and preserving process is obviously a major part of the book, since it determined the economic prowess of several European nations and is a major reason the Basques were able to survive as an independent people despite the fact that they have always been ruled by others. But some of the discoveries and advances are more surprising: Natural gas was discovered by the Chinese, who noticed that some salt miners would mysteriously lay down and die in certain spots underground, and that the same substance causing the deaths also appeared to be causing the sudden, massive explosions that plagued those mines. They eventually identified it as a fuel and figured out how to harness it, something which every home and professional cook should appreciate.

Kurlansky largely lets the tale of salt tell itself, although it might be a stretch to call it a tale, since there isn’t a single narrative thread as you might see in a biography. The book is more a collection of anecdotes and mini-histories in chronological order, with the bulk of the book spent on ancient uses of salt and on Europe’s mercantilist period. For a quick read, it’s packed with information, although I thought he gave somewhat short shrift to the aforementioned rise of artisan salts, instead focusing on the rise of Big Salt and the consolidation of the world salt industry. One note to fellow sticklers: Kurlansky’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary leaves a little something to be desired, and even his editors didn’t catch every stray comma or word error (e.g., using “parley” for “parlay”), but the mistakes weren’t frequent enough to get under my skin. Okay, maybe a little bit.

Filed Under: Cooking, Nonfiction Tagged With: ,
→ September 7, 2007
→ By

Those Holiday Inn commercials.

So in first place on the list of “worst current commercial campaigns” has to be the Holiday Inn ads with the three blond guys making fools of themselves, right? What exactly is the message that Holiday Inn is trying to send here?

  • “Only dorks stay at our hotels.”
  • “If you don’t want to talk to people like these guys, stay somewhere else.”
  • “Holiday Inn: We’ll make you uncomfortable in every sense of the word.”

Avis did something like this a few years ago, albeit not quite as bad, with their campaign “What if we didn’t try harder?” After which, you’d get 15-20 seconds of a customer having a very bad experience at an Avis rental car outlet.

Marketing and advertising are certainly inexact sciences, but to me, a good ad should have two or three things: recall, a positive message about the brand or product, and perhaps a call to action depending on what the commercial is advertising. The worst ads have great recall but leave the viewer with a very negative impression of the brand or product. The Holiday Inn ads are unmistakable – as soon as I see any of those three idiots on the screen, I’m flying for the remote – and they’ve made it clear to me that Holiday Inn is the antithesis of cool. And yet these ads have been running for over a year, and I’m sure we’ll be inundated with them again in the playoffs. Good luck cleaning up that brand image after you’ve spent a year and a half defecating all over it.

Filed Under: Media
→ September 5, 2007
→ By

The Yankee Stadium squirrel.

I can take partial credit for this picture. I was at the game last night, and when I saw the squirrel on the scoreboard, that caption was the first thing that popped into my head. Thanks to Chris for executing my artistic vision.

Filed Under: Humor
→ September 2, 2007
→ By

Peach pie.

OK, this post isn’t really about peach pie, although it’s inspired by the one I made today, using probably the last of the local peaches we’ll see up here this year. I’ve made a peach pie every August for five or six years now, but it used to be more work than it is now because dealing with the peaches was such a pain in the ass. Making peach pie requires removing the skin from the peaches – something you don’t have to do to make peach preserves, which I also do every year – and taking the skin off a peach used to be as hard as taking a nickel from Carl Pohlad.

The classic technique, found in both Joy of Cooking and Baking Illustrated, involves scoring the skin, blanching the peaches for one to two minutes (“blanching” means sticking them in boiling water), and then shocking them in ice water to kill any residual heat and prevent the peaches from cooking. This was a potential mess, since the peach skins didn’t always come off easily, the flesh underneath would always soften (trouble if the peach was already ripe), and you’d have two more things to clean.

So the real purpose of this post is to recommend a kitchen gadget. For Christmas of ’05 I got a Mario Batali serrated peeler as a gift, and I use it almost exclusively for one thing: peeling peaches. It’s also supposed to be wonderful for peeling tomatoes and plums, but who the hell peels plums besides Jack Horner’s mom? Anyway, the serrated peeler makes quick work of the peaches required for a pie, and I’d say saves me 15-20 minutes of prep, plus the cleanup time, not to mention all the swearing and aggravation that usually ended with me peeling the damn things with a paring knife anyway.

There’s also an Oxo version that’s $2 cheaper; I’ve got several Oxo products, including two straight-bladed vegetable peelers, and they do offer a good grip, although I find it annoying that the slits on the sides trap water in the dishwasher. I’m guessing there’s no real difference in how they perform, since I’ve never had a problem with any of the Oxo items I own.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With:
→ August 31, 2007
→ By

Starting with Wodehouse.

So a friend/reader asked me today where he might get started with the works of P.G. Wodehouse. Here’s what I wrote:

Well, he has two primary series: Jeeves/Wooster and Blandings. Jeeves/Wooster is more famous, but I wouldn’t say it’s better, just different.

There’s a three-in-one set called Life With Jeeves that’s a great place to start with those stories. It comprises two collections of short stories, plus one entire Jeeves novel. It’s how I got started on Wodehouse, and since seven years later, I’m still enjoying his stuff, I’d say that worked out.

The first Blandings novel is Something Fresh and introduces the critical character, Lord Emsworth, who is something of a dingbat with an odd affection for his pig, the Empress. The book I mentioned in chat today, Galahad at Blandings, is much later in the series.

And if you just want to read a standalone book that’s not part of a series, I’m particularly fond of The Small Bachelor, a really funny book with some of Wodehouse’s best characters.

Filed Under: Literature
→ August 31, 2007
→ By

Chicago eats.

So I had some ups and downs in Chicago, but I’m glad to say that after some mediocre meals to start, I finished strong.

The Oak Tree Room is in the same building as the Four Seasons, at 900 N Michigan Ave. I had read that they offered excellent cranberry-pecan pancakes, and I wanted to get some exercise, so I walked up there … and was disappointed. The pancakes were dry and flat, and the dried cranberries tasted more like candied fruit than dried.

Vong’s Thai Kitchen on Hubbard (near the Billy Goat Tavern) was another disappointment, not least because the service was comically bad. I still have no idea who my server was, and I ended up waiting about ten minutes to order (past the point where my menu was closed) and ten or fifteen minutes for someone to realize I was done and offer me the check. A waitress, maybe “my” waitress, did eventually come and ask if I wanted to try one of their “mini” desserts (which are apparently about $1.50) each, but by that point I was annoyed enough to just want to leave. Plus I had a gelateria in my sights for the afternoon.

Anyway, the food at Vong’s was also disappointing, since it’s not so much Thai food as haute cuisine served on a bed of Thai food. I skipped the pad thai, my usual bellwether dish for Thai restaurants, fearing it would be too sweet – let’s face it, there were no Thai customers in the place, and that’s not a good sign for the authenticity of the food. I ordered panang curry with “pulled” chicken, and the chicken part was very good, still moist and indeed resembling pulled chicken. But the peanut-dominated sauce was heavy and slightly bitter, and there wasn’t much else in the sauce besides the chicken and some peas. The complimentary salad of shredded daikon and carrots in a “Szechuan” vinaigrette (can we just call it a sesame vinaigrette? Is that so freaking hard? And why would I want a Szechuan vinaigrette in a Thai restaurant?) was very good, but a poor harbinger of what was to come.

Just across the street from the Oak Tree Room is an Italian deli called L’Appetito that purports to sell gelato. They don’t. That stuff is ice cream, a claim I can support by pointing out that I couldn’t get my plastic spoon into the stuff. Next.

I had dinner with a longtime email correspondent and regular on Baseball Think Factory, who goes by the handle “Shredder.” He suggested La Creperie on Clark, which is close to Wrigley Field without being right on top of it. Their savory crepes are all made with buckwheat, and I went with a chicken, goat cheese, and tomato crepe. It was delicious; the goat cheese was the dominant flavor, and it worked nicely with the béchamel sauce that filled the crepe. The chicken was white meat, a little overcooked (I assume it was cooked first before it was added to the crepe), but since it was sitting in the sauce it wasn’t a big deal. The tomatoes were fresh, but really, I could take or leave tomatoes. This was about the goat cheese, and the crepe itself, which was delicious, slightly nutty but not overwhelmingly buckwheaty.

Thursday’s breakfast was at Lou Mitchell’s on W Jackson St, near Canal. They’re known for their homemade pastries, so I asked the waitress what one pastry I should order, and I got this answer: “They’re all good.” Yeah, you’re a big help, sweetheart. I can see why you’re not in sales. I went with a coconut donut, which was one of the daily specials; it was a cake donut, very moist, but the glaze was sickeningly sweet and I only ate about a third of it. The Greek bread that came with the meal was a much bigger success, almost like a challah bread with a soft interior and a very crumbly exterior. As for the meal itself, I went with my usual EMPT, going for two eggs scrambled with bacon. The “two eggs” bit is a joke; the meal came in a seven- or eight-inch skillet, and the scrambled eggs took up half the skillet, which has to be at least four eggs considering how thick they were. They were cooked through, a touch dry, but good overall. The potatoes were sliced very thinly and appeared to be cooked solely on the flat-top in a pile, so that some were just steamed while others were nicely browned. Total $10.42 before tip.

Lunch was at the Frontera Grill, accompanied by Jayson Stark. I went with the tacos al carbon, and asked the waiter whether I should get the skirt steak (traditional) or the duck, and he said it was a coin flip but he’d take the duck. Thank God for someone with the cojones to answer one freaking question. Anyway, before the meal came we had some chips and two salsas, one green, the other a dark red with some sort of roasted peppers in it, and both were outstanding, with the red salsa spicy but not at all hot, and both boasting gorgeous bright colors. The tacos al carbon ($15) came with a delicious and clearly fresh guacamole that had never seen the inside of a food processor, with good chunks of avocado still in it and hints of garlic and cilantro that didn’t overwhelm the fresh avocado flavor. The duck was delicious, but unfortunately had some gristle in it, something I haven’t encountered before, although to be fair I usually go with duck leg rather than breast. The meat was medium-rare, but more rare in some parts (where the gristle was) and medium in others. The best part of the dish was something I can only call a Mexican version of baked beans (frijoles charros), with red beans perfectly cooked (soft but al dente) in a reduced, smoky-sweet sauce redolent of bacon. Jayson ordered a shrimp dish ( camarones en salsa verde con hongos) that he said was one of the best things he had ever tasted.

My last meal in Chicago was probably the most interesting of the trip, mostly good, some less good. The place is called Twist, and it’s a tapas bar (tapas here meaning “small plates,” not Spanish food) down Sheffield, a block or two south of Wrigley Field. Overall the food was good, made from fresh ingredients and prepared right in front of anyone who sits at the bar (as I did). I ordered three dishes: braised beef tenderloin on a corn cake with feta and a spicy aioli, dates wrapped in bacon, and grilled “vegetables” (zucchini and yellow squash, as it turns out) on crostini with goat cheese. The last dish was the biggest hit for me; the bread used for the crostini was delicious, and there was just a dab of goat cheese sitting on a small spread of roasted red pepper purée sitting on the slab of squash. It was perfect, with accent flavors from the toppings complementing but not overwhelming the flavor of the squash, finished with a nice crunch.

The dates wrapped in bacon were excellent, except for one thing: the dates themselves were sugared, making for a bizarre, sweet note to finish the dish, not a flavor I’m used to experiencing in a savory dish. The bacon was perfectly cooked, and the dish came with a thick balsamic-based sauce with a gravy-like consistency, although I couldn’t tell you how much it contributed since “sweet” was the dominant flavor.

The big question mark for me was the beef tenderloin. The beef was marinated in something strong and acidic, most likely a red wine concoction, and was served shredded in a mound on a corn cake (very soft, with a consistency more like grits than polenta, and oddly enough, no actual corn kernels), with large hunks of feta cheese, chopped red onion and tomatoes, and then lines of a spicy “aioli” that was really mayonnaise with chili oil or hot sauce added. (True aioli doesn’t have egg yolks in it, but this sauce did.) Think about that flavor combination: the beef, cheese, onions, and tomatoes are all acidic and tangy, pleasant flavors in small doses but overwhelming in large doses. The only other flavor in the dish is the heat from the spicy aioli. The corn cakes weren’t sweet, and weren’t really salty, although it’s possible that all the sour/tangy/spicy numbed my mouth to the point where I couldn’t taste what they offered. The shame of it all is that the ingredients in the dish were good and the concept was as well: a piece of braised beef tenderloin, preferably served whole, on a sweet corn cake with corn in it, with a spicy aioli or mayo would have been perfect, simpler, cheaper to make, and less of a mess on the plate. There was a good dish hiding in here, but I couldn’t make it out because they went overboard with the additions.

All that said, I’d definitely recommend Twist as a pre-Cubs game hideout. At 5:40 on a Thursday game night, there was no wait, and the place wasn’t full when I left. The food was good, the place is nice, and you don’t have to deal with Cubs fans or tourists who view the game as an excuse to get hammered. I’m just hoping that the Twist chefs simplify some of their dishes to let the clean flavors of the ingredients come through.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ August 30, 2007
→ By

Rebecca.

I’m a big Hitchcock fan – I’ve seen over twenty of his movies, and when AllNight’s Jason Smith asked me (off air) the other day which was my favorite, I scuffled a little, because it’s hard to pick one. I eventually went with North by Northwest, although I considered Rear Window and To Catch a Thief (Two hours of Grace Kelly? Hell yeah!) first. But there’s one major Hitchcock flick I’ve yet to see, because I wanted to read the book first: his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

My wife had a copy of Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn in the house for years, but I never considered reading it because it was a purple mass-market paperback that looked like a trashy romance novel (which is odd, because my wife never reads that crap). Then I noticed Hitchcock had adapted that book as well – it’s a 1933 film before he came to Hollywood, and the print that still survives is low quality, with horrible audio – and my wife told me I was being an idiot. It turns out that it’s an incredible suspense novel with a faint romantic element, and it has a steady crescendo that accelerates through the last two-thirds of the book or so. I enjoyed the book even more because I’d recently finished The Lighthouse Stevensons, a nonfiction book that describes the construction of lighthouses around the coast of England by the family that also produced Robert Louis Stevenson, and which gave me a lot of background that made the plot of Jamaica Inn clearer.

Rebecca is a different kind of suspense novel than Jamaica Inn, eschewing the protagonist-in-mortal-danger motif for a more psychological one, with jealousy as its dominant theme. The narrator, a never-named 21-year-old woman, marries Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower who lives on an estate called Manderley in rural England. Maxim’s previous wife, Rebecca, was killed in a boating accident just under a year prior, and it appears that the staff, particularly the sinister Mrs. Danvers, are none too pleased about his quick remarriage. The discovery of the boat Rebecca was sailing when she died sets off a chain of events that put Maxim, his wife, and Manderley into danger, but largely danger of a psychological sort rather than a physical one. Jealousy flies in all directions from multiple characters, notably the narrator’s jealousy of her deceased predecessor and Mrs. Danvers’ jealousy of the narrator for taking Rebecca’s place.

Du Maurier’s prose is fantastic, as she has a clear eye and an easy way of imparting the details of the environment, particularly anything out of doors, to the reader, and her dialogue is quick and intelligent. The story itself flows brilliantly, hinging on small twists of fate and relying more on the realistic actions of its characters to drive the plot forward. And the characters are given multiple dimensions, although the narrator’s timidity – overcoming which is a background theme in the novel – made me want to slap her a handful of times after she first arrived at Manderley.

Rebecca also owes a significant debt to Jane Eyre, another novel of a somewhat-forbidden relationship set in a large, foreboding country estate. I hate to apply the word “gothic” to any novel, given the connotations the word has today, but these are two clear masterpieces of English literature and transcend the limitations that “gothic” might seem to impose on a work of fiction.

All that said, I think I preferred Jamaica Inn for its intensity and the way it builds to a big, long climax to Rebecca‘s more grounded and perhaps more realistic drama of speech and situation, even though Rebecca stands up better to literary analysis … and is the only one that comes in a non-purple, trade-paperback edition.

Filed Under: Literature