Eat Cake

I don't know how to talk about fiction and make people give a shit. So I'm just going to talk about fiction. This book specifically.

The plot: "Fleeing to London from America after the spectacular collapse of her family, Tanya buys a house, builds a business, and finally begins to conquer her addiction to sex. Then the gorgeous Eleanor enters her life. El is a talented artist, perhaps a great one, but vulnerable and chaotic. Tanya decides that what El needs is a safe haven. But in Sandra Newman's rollercoaster world, nowhere is safe, least of all home..." (from the back cover)

This is how it begins:

"We met her when she crashed our party.
I had just bought a house and Todd decided that before we cleaned it up, we ought to have a party for our rougher, druggy friends, the Hackney crew. All the junkies, squatters, failing students, all the people who might hit an artery or run amok or die at someone's party. So you couldn't ask anyone except the kind of rabble you don't even want in your house, OK.
Except, I did tell this one CFO from work, Mark Keynes--who I'd run into at a Plan 9 gig once and we had kind of bonded. Like, got throwing-up drunk but didn't fuck then. So, he's alpha at my work, he does karate, he's attractive--I would blurt shit at him just to say something. I blurted, oh, this party cause I bought a house cause I'm so fucking brilliant in so many words. But I added that he shouldn't come, I didn't want him there. He laughed and said that he was 'uninsultable'.
Then, catastrophically, he came, but."




Other things you need to know about this book:

-It's brilliant
-Lots of cursing
-Lots of sex (more specifically, fucking. See also, pedophilia, incest)
-Lots of murder (and details)
-"Art"
-Drugs
-It will probably ruin other books for you


Other things I'm going to say:


I had a fiction workshop with Sandra Newman at Temple some years ago. Only, I didn't know who she was and I didn't care much for the workshop. (It was before I realized I'm a poet, so I just didn't get it. And, she perhaps wasn't the best teacher...that's ok to say because of what I'm going to get into:) I assumed she was some weird writing teacher--like the ones who teach to support themselves (99% of all writers), but perhaps wouldn't have to teach if they were good writers. (You would be hard-pressed to find a faculty member at Temple who is worth reading. So I also assumed you teach because you suck.) But she was a writer-in-residence and, after the class ended and I got curious, she became one of my favorite writers. She wasn't teaching because she sucked.

I've read both of her novels--The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done and Cake. I read the former in 3 days, which wasn't a tall order because some of the pages had just a couple sentences on them. The latter I had to order from the UK, as it doesn't appear to be available in the US. I read about half of it and then fell out of it. Her style is sometimes hard to get into, at least in this book. It's somewhat stream of consciousness (or it feels that way). Sentences/paragraphs/pages end in the middle of a thought, sometimes continuing on a next page or after an aside. The narrator is an American living in London, as are a few characters, and it seems the dialog plays with that. The narrator has these parenthetical asides that can go on for a page or more, and she sometimes interrupts herself with them. The chapters are short, usually a few pages, but sometimes 1 or 2. I initially found it hard to connect with the characters and the story as a whole. I just didn't feel invested in it. But I gave it another shot, and having read half of it once already helped. I think I had to learn to appreciate the idiosyncrasies. The humor is dark and subtle. This isn't your typical novel. Not even remotely.