Land of Milk and Honey (2023) by C. Pam Zhang

 

American author C. Pam Zhang

Book Review

Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

by C. Pam Zhang

      I didn't love C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, but I certainly admired it.  Any American author who makes their debut novel something OTHER than a coming-of-age book about their particular experience/milieu or a book about how difficult relationships, dating and marriage are is interesting to me.  That debut didn't go unnoticed- it got longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey was published by Penguin Random House main, where her first book was published by Riverhead, the prestige literary fiction imprint wholly owned and operated Penguin, now Penguin Random House.  That's a promotion! 

   I mention it because so much of the contemporary scene for literary fiction is decided by who gets published in the first place, and whether they get a second book, a third book, etc, at the same level.  Readers have almost nothing to do with that process, and yet breaking free of its orbit in any significant way is essentially impossible.  When you write about contemporary literary fiction you are writing about the mainstream publishing behemoths and their market-driven choices.   

  I knew Land of Milk and Honey would be a priority read after reading a one line description that promised a near-future dystopia and a food-driven plot.  How, I thought to myself, could that go wrong?  I found the New York Times book review, written by Alexandra Kleeman, to be polite but not an overwhelming recommendation.  She also claims to respect Zhang's resistance to the short-attention span of modern readers, but it was hard for me to see how Land of Milk and Honey would be taxing to the average reader of literary fiction.  It is, after all, part genre- nothing complicated about a climate-based near-future dystopia because we already live in one, and part conventional American literary fiction about a character with a complicated relationship to capitalism, western values and her immigrant parents.   

   I checked out the Audiobook from the library- narrated by Eunice Wong (Julliard graduate actress) who voices the Southern Californian Chinese-American chef (nameless by design) at the center of the book.   It was a great Audiobook- Wong captures the voice of the chef, no doubt.   The story at the center of the book- a remote Italian mountain top where a billionaire and his prodigy daughter are preparing to survive the end of the world- has its moments, but the most memorable portions concerned the chef looking back on her relationship with her doctor-in-china-cleaning-lady-in-america single mother and her struggles growing up in southern california.