The Devil’s Larder
Jim Crace’s most recent collection of short stories, The Devil’s Larder (FSG, $20) tackles a popular topic: food. Characteristically, however, Crace’s treatment of his subject matter goes well past its previously prescribed limits, past the mouth and stomach, into the lower depths somewhere between Rabelais and Freud. Jim Crace has become something of a writer’s writer of fiction, known primarily in literary circles for his quirky subject matter and ethereal prose. His last novel, Being Dead, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, relentlessly chronicled the gruesome murder of a middle-aged couple. With scientific precision, his narrative meticulously dissects their death, holding it up to different lights, examining the process of dying down to a cellular level. In the same way, The Devil’s Larder takes a presumably simple theme — food — and studies it from every perspective. In this case, Crace has given us 64 vignettes in which he illustrates the many ways that food and eating can become a unifying force in the human comedy.But these stories are less about cuisine than about the little eruptions of life. Crace is admittedly not particularly interested in food, but the ways in which life’s great dramas play themselves out on tiny stages. Painstaking, fastidious, Crace’s prose traces out the well-trodden paths of everyday life. But somehow his lens is distorted, throwing an eerie light onto each of life’s rituals. The stories in The Devil’s Larder are slightly macabre, disturbing even. Their unifying feature, food, is not something the writer celebrates, but rather a circumstantial feature of each disquieting episode. Thus, death becomes the ironic endpoint to a carefully followed diet designed to promote longevity. In another tale, the convivial protagonist savors the rare pleasure of indulging in a secret misanthropy when he plays truant at a dinner party. The story begins with the line, “There is no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.” Yet another story takes a fantastic spin as it follows the savory and nourishing after-life of an old man’s murderous tumor. Through a prankish play-on-words it suggests that one man’s tumor is another man’s tuber.
Like roots themselves, these stories are deeply organic. They reflect Crace’s ongoing fascination with the intersection between nature and culture, people and their environment. The Devil’s Larder reeks of freshly tilled earth, warm soup, and sea water. It spans the spectrum of experience — from childhood to marriage, to old age and death. And told through Crace’s nostalgic, placid prose, each of the stories seem equivocally benign. Yet their tidy facades mask all of the turbulence of life’s endless struggles, culminating in a two-word story that captures the spirit of humanity — “Oh honey.”
Despite its slim profile, The Devil’s Larder is not the kind of book you devour from start to finish, but the kind you nibble on, taking small bites at a time. More like prose poems, these stories are simply too rich to digest in one sitting. Their proper enjoyment requires careful contemplation. Like the episodic experience of a human life, each story seems absurdly simple, but taken together they comprise an unruly tangle. The Devil’s Larder is at once dark and sentimental, optimistically ambiguous, and sweetly deceptive.
This article appears in December 28 • 2001.
