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Summary
Summary
Los Angeles, 1934. Mary Frances is on the cusp of becoming M.F.K. Fisher-the writer whose artful personal essays about food created a genre. She is hungry, and not just for food: she wants Tim, her husband Al's charming friend, who encourages her writing and seems to understand her. After a night's transgression with Tim, it's only a matter of time before Mary Frances claims what she truly desires, plunging all three of them into a tangled triangle of affection that will have far-reaching effects on their families, their careers and their lives.
Author Notes
Ashley Warlick is the youngest recipient of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, which she won for "The Distance from the Heart of Things", her first novel. She graduated from Dickinson College in 1994 & lives in South Carolina with her husband & daughter.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This stellar novel from Warlick (Seek the Living) fictionalizes the beginnings of the seminal food writer M.F.K. Fisher-known to her friends as Mary Frances-amid the triangle of her professor husband, Al, and their friend Tim Parrish in 1930s Los Angeles. Though Al is a writer, or perhaps because he is one, he proves to be a poor source of creative support for Mary Frances. He dismisses her essays as a hobby. Both find a connection with their published neighbor Tim, who is married to a much younger aspiring actress named Gigi. Tim nurtures Mary Frances's talents, and their affection soon turns physical. Shortly afterward, Gigi suddenly leaves Tim for another man, sending Tim reeling. He flees back east to recover, but later reconnects with Mary Frances. They become lovers again, though Mary Frances states that she can't leave Al, who is at his lowest after the death of his father, unable to write or find work that he likes. The trio then find themselves living together at Tim's behest in Switzerland, shortly after Mary Frances scores a book deal. Warlick handles her protagonists' affair with complexity: it's clear that Mary Frances and Tim both love Al and don't want to hurt him. It's a treat to find such a beautifully written treatment of love in its different forms amid M.F.K. Fisher's tale of unlikely success. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff & Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Warlick (Seek the Living, 2005) fictionalizes one aspect of the life of M. F. K. Fisher, the celebrated food writer, in this novel of daring romance. Torn between two lovers may be the stuff of torch songs, but in reality, the emotional turmoil that came from loving both her husband and her husband's best friend was the fire that fueled Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's passion. Daring, insatiable, luscious Mary Frances finds a simmering comfort in her undemonstrative marriage to impoverished professor and frustrated poet Al Fisher. It is her wanton, one-night stand with the wealthy and debonair Tim Parrish that reinvigorates her life. When Tim's marriage to the glittery starlet Gigi ends, he decamps for Europe, only to discover he can't live without Mary Frances' ardor or Al's camaraderie. The solution, he thinks, is to invite the couple to live with him at his estate in the Swiss Alps. In Warlick's tantalizing and delectable portrayal of the epic, actual love affair between Fisher and Parrish, adultery and marital dissolution, loyalty and friendship, ambition and defeat are as zestfully layered as the most succulent torte.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SARA PORTER, the woman at the center of "The Theoretical Foot," a novel by M.F.K. Fisher written in 1939 and unpublished until now, glides silently in and out of the rooms of the Swiss house she shares with her ethereal, silver-haired lover, Tim Garton. Everything is arranged to delight, selected with understated and flawless good taste. Every meal sates hunger without stepping into vulgar excess. Sara's instincts are always subtly, intuitively right. Those around her, particularly her brother and sister, who have just arrived for a visit, yearn to please her and are utterly reliant on her good opinion. Sara is, in short, a self-satisfied, selectively generous and frequently withholding snob. How you react to Sara is likely to mirror your feelings about Fisher, the celebrated author revered as the founder of gastronomic belles lettres, whose beauty, independence and bravery have inspired generations of plucky, introspective, preternaturally perceptive writers - or writers who wish to be all those things. If you view Fisher as cold and conceited, this book probably won't change your mind. But it will give you more insight into and compassion for a difficult life - compassion the author doesn't necessarily have for her characters, or even herself. You will, never fear, keep intact your memories of Fisher as a confident, seductive stylist. The story she constructed, set in the summer of 1938, keeps you wanting to know more, particularly as we are brought closer to La Prairie and its house party of gilded expats, one more lithe, epigrammatic and oblique than the next, united only by their reliance on Sara and by their self-absorption. The implied criticism of characters alive to every shifting emotional hue yet numb to the world is deliberate. The brownshirts of Germany, where the first of this parade of young and beautiful Americans have been tramping, are both companionable and menacing. Sara's sister - tall and of course beautiful - is, we learn, secretly in love with a pale Jew, who her family knows is in danger, though not how much. Small dramas acquire the status of rumbling storms: the fate of the young couple's romance; the thwarted lesbian desire of a society prig for Tim's sister, a renowned poet; the need of Sara's brother and sister to break away from the reproachful perfection that suffocates them. We know all these maneuverings will soon seem as shallow as the characters too seldom understand them to be. Another specter hangs over "The Theoretical Foot" - the fevered, crazed suffering of a man we read of in short, very occasional italicized passages, whose unnamed malady will lead to the amputation of his leg and tormenting phantom pain, hence the novel's odd title. We never quite know the identity of either the sufferer, who longs for the release of death, or of his loyal wife, though we infer them to be the central couple (married to absent people, not each other, when the central action of the book takes place). More than the shadows of Nazism, these jarring, hallucinatory scenes convey both doom and agony. Although some of the style is warmedover Hemingway ("You must kill what you love best, if your love for it is crooked and unhealthy"), most of it has the unflinching spareness Fisher's admirers rely on, along with the essential eruptions of sensuality. The book is strongly of its period, enhanced by the irony we bring to it: We know so much more about the consequences of the good life between the wars that we can judge the characters even more than the author did at the time. Fisher is frank about sexuality in a way that, as Jane Vandenburgh speculates in an afterword, might have kept her from seeking a market for the book, as she halfheartedly did when in need of money. The young, firm-breasted coed we meet in the first chapter has frequent, guiltless sex with her swain; Sara's sister casually refers to Sara as "a woman who believes in adultery." There are overtones of homosexuality, most of them contemptuous, except for a scene in which two young men strip to sleep in the sun and wrestle half-naked. The fastidious houseboy is dismissed as a delicate flower, mocked for simpering over Sara's young, virile brother. The most harshly drawn character is the shrewish, fat lesbian who takes out her frustrated desire by secretly slurping up Sara's golden, hand-beaten mayonnaise on snatched toast points. More surprisingly, there are hints of incest. The only person the poet yearns for, with an intense, itchy desire, is her brother; Sara's brother might also be in love with Tim. The varied and frustrated appetites of the characters evoke one of Fisher's famous lines: "When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it." As for actual food, there's not much to be seen, although it's mentioned in passing ("She felt as clean, as sterile, as boring as a dairy lunch"). Sara uses her culinary skill as a way to establish superiority as much as to feed her guests, which she prides herself on doing, frequently to the exclusion of actually engaging with them. The "little roasted cold pigeons," "tender and rich"; the "green nugget" of chicory; and the "fruit soaked with kirsch in a bowl and little crisp biscuits made in the village," served with champagne, are of the European sophistication and simplicity Fisher's fans expect. But such menus leave a sour taste. There's a pall over all the pleasure, not just cast by the war but by the intermittent italicized agonies of the unnamed man. Ultimately the book fails to make us care about the characters because the author doesn't seem to like them very much. We hear the inner voices of most of the main characters, but not the central couple, perhaps because Fisher idolized the man and perhaps because she knew how unsympathetic we might find the woman, whose perfection comes at a heavy price. We may catch glimpses of her own judgment against herself in the prig's incessant scrutinizing of Sara's morality and in her sister's wish that she "would, sometimes, engage" rather than maintain "such impassive courtesy." Fisher had plenty of reasons to be in an ill temper. We learn in the afterword that the silver-haired hero was Fisher's lover and then husband, Dillwyn Parrish, familiar to Fisher readers as the worldly Chexbres, and that Fisher was watching him suffer the pain of the fevered passages, caused by a fatal degenerative disease that resulted in the amputation of his leg just after the summer of 1938. The narrative and many of the characters, including the central couple's siblings and the harpy friend, were closely based on people who visited Le Paquis, the house Parrish bought with financial help from his sister, a famous novelist. Soon after Fisher finished and put away the manuscript, in the California house the couple found when they ran out of money to keep up Le Paquis, things went very, very badly. It makes you more inclined to forgive the novel's flaws, if not exactly wish to have been a guest in its house, no matter how tasteful and how copious the food and wine. Yet longing to have experienced that sensual life is exactly what readers of "The Gastronomical Me" and Fisher's other descriptions of Europe, so elliptically alluring, most want to do. Fisher's partial frankness, at once crystalline and gauzy, exasperated her excellent biographer, Joan Reardon, but mostly tantalizes readers. One of them is Ashley Warlick, a Southern food-magazine editor and bookseller, also the author of four novels, who spent 10 years reading as much biographical material as she could find in order to reconstruct an episode Fisher left out of her novel: when she and her first husband, Al Fisher, an English professor and poet, formed an uneasy ménage à trois with Parrish. Warlick chooses the four years before the summer when "The Theoretical Foot" takes place, and Southern California, where Fisher spent her formative years, as the principal setting for her biographical novel, "The Arrangement." Here we meet Parrish's wife, an aspiring starlet named Gigi, with whom the Fishers live in Los Angeles in a yet more uneasy ménage while Parrish travels to Europe to separate from her. We are told of Al's impotence, one of the reasons Fisher gave for leaving him (he was also out of work). We taste much more food than Fisher supplied in her novel; we read a lot of sex scenes between Fisher and Parrish. If the prose is often overheated ("They were lovers now, flesh and beating blood, lovers, and there was nothing to do but dive in, headlong"), you can forgive it. Like a good actor, and like the cats she posed with in Sonoma at the end of her long life in the cottage she called Last House, where she was visited by the sister she barely disguised in her novel, Fisher made you come to her. It's natural to want to fill in the emotional distance she left in her nonfiction, to take advantage of the sexy details of her unconventional life in the 1930s, to warm up the chill Fisher maintained in her writing - even, in "The Theoretical Foot," from herself. Your appetite for "The Arrangement," a proficient, earnest and livelier book than Fisher's, will depend on your desire to bridge the gap she spent a lifetime minding. CORBY KUMMER, a senior editor of The Atlantic, is the author of "The Pleasures of Slow Food" and "The Joy of Coffee."
Kirkus Review
Blending fact and fiction, this historical novel covers nine eventful years in the life of legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher. All the ingredients for a lively, literate page-turner are here: a beautiful, talented protagonist; lush settings; illicit sex; mouthwatering food. But the novel falls flatironic considering how buoyant and lyrical Fisher's own writing is. Beginning in 1934, the book is mostly about the unraveling of Mary Frances Kennedy's marriage to Al Fisher, a college professor, and her affair withand eventual marriage toDillwyn "Tim" Parrish, a painter and sometime writer who edited and encouraged her early work. The narrative, which faithfully follows the outlines of Fisher's life, moves between California, France, and Switzerland, where the Fishers briefly lived with Parrish. The two men were close friends, and there is plenty of agonizing on the part of the adulterous lovers on the right course of action to take with regard to Al, who has problems with sexual and professional performance. Perhaps as a result, the novel often feels gray and despairing. Another problem: Fisher's life is not exactly unexamined. In addition to a gastronomic memoir, she published many booksin which she figured prominentlyas well as journals and correspondence. Since her death in 1992, two biographies have appeared. That doesn't leave so much for a novelist to imagine. Warlick, author of three previous works of fiction, contributes invented dialoguesome of it stiltedand fairly graphic sex scenes, which don't really deepen our understanding of the characters. She also tells the story from multiple perspectives, which proves distractingbetter to have homed in on Fisher's point of view. Warlick is not a bad writer, and this novel is an ambitious effort. In the end, though, it never makes us care about its star-crossed trio. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Reimagining Mary Frances Kennedy (M.F.K.) Fisher's relationship with Tim Parrish, whom Fisher eventually married, Warlick (Seek the Living) chronicles the full arc of their romance, -beginning with what happened before the marriage: the arrangements. The first takes place in Los Angeles and involves a Hollywood starlet and a potential studio scandal, because in the late 1930s actresses did not get divorced. Mary Frances and her husband, Al Fisher, move in with Tim's wife, Gigi, while Tim secretly files for divorce back east. The second arrangement takes place in Switzerland, where Tim, Mary Frances, and Al make an awkward threesome. Strangely, for a story of passion, much of the writing is terse and dispassionate except when the subject is food; Warlick is better at showing us Fisher as food writer than as lover. There are choppy shifts in perspective among the three main characters, and the narrative is not improved by the random flash-forwards to the present. In her novel The -Theoretical Foot, Fisher writes what she knows. A scene in Warlick's work depicts an elderly Fisher reflecting, while sorting through her notebooks, that ".she has written about Tim for years now. Hasn't she always written about Tim?" Well, she certainly does here. The story is autobiographical; while the events that occur may be fictional, they draw heavily from Fisher's own life. Tim is still Tim, but everyone else gets a pseudonym, including the barely disguised members of both of their families. The two have not yet married and are living in sin in 1930s Switzerland. The Nazis are expanding throughout Europe but are mostly background noise for the fashionable set staying at La Prairie house. The work reads as a series of interrelated character studies. Sara, -Fisher's stand-in, spends most of her time in the kitchen, and Tim in the wine cellar, but the two serve as the nexus for their houseguests. In a highly compressed period of time, Tim and Sara's friends meet, greet, fall in love, fall out of love, grow up, and make life-changing decisions. And they do it with energy, passion, and misguided desire. As with Warlick's novel, this title includes awkward interjections from the future; a patient (Tim) is recovering from an amputation and plagued by a phantom limb, the eponymous theoretical foot. Fortunately, it doesn't distract from the larger story. Verdict The -Arrangement is more -successful with the -history of Fisher and Parrish's relationship than with capturing emotion, while The -Theoretical Foot overall presents an -engaging read, recommended for fans of Fisher, literary fiction, and historical travel fiction. [See Prepub Alert 8/31/15 for Warlick's The -Arrangement.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.