in search of a competent writer

In Search of an Impotent Man (Suche Impotenten Mann Fürs Leben) should be a refreshing change from the usual chick-lit plots.  Its heroine, Carmen, is smart, successful and gorgeous.  Tired of being treated as a sex object by her boyfriend, she gives him the boot and places an personal ad looking for an impotent man to share her life.  She gets an overwhelming response, but discovers that having given up on sex, she now really wants it.  In an added twist, the impotent man she’s most keen on turns out to have been faking his impotence all along.  And after many hi-jinks, they live happily ever after.

In Search of an Impotent Man has sold over a million copies, but this is in despite of, not because of, the poor execution of this great idea.  The book has two completely superfluous subplots involving a jewellery heist and a pregnant best friend; and the main plot has holes in it that warp the space-time continuum.  But mostly, the writing is just really bad.  At first I thought it was suffering from over-literal translation, but having read the German version of the book, I can confirm it’s bad in the original too.  Gaby Hauptmann will spend five paragraphs describing Carmen cooking some frozen calamari, and then in the next paragraph move the action on to the office a week later.  The dialogue is wooden and cheesy and the few attempts at scene setting are flat and commonplace.  It’s really clunky writing that made me want to get my red pen out and begin editing.

Carmen is a little one-dimensional, but she’s smart, canny and sharp,  and unlike most chicklit heroines she concentrates of having fun and celebrating her success rather than feeling sorry for herself.  The book would be better if there were fewer subplots, and more of Carmen’s inner life.  She deserves to be the creation of a better writer.

In Search of an Impotent Man / Suche Impotenten Mann furs Leben
Gabi Hauptmann
Virago, 1998 / Piper, 1995

in defense of food

Michael Pollan seeks to reconnect humans with their traditional knowledge of diet and the pleasure of eating simple healthy real with the mantra: ‘Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants’.  In Defense of Food is a passionate argument against ‘nutritionism’ – the idea that it is only the scientifically identifiable nutrients on food that determine their value in the diet.

Pollan briefly explores the history of nutritionism, beginning with the first experiments in the 19th Century to identify the so-called magic essentials of food, moving through the discovery of vitamins in the 1920s, and is at pains to emphasise how inconclusive most research into individual nutrients was.  He lands in the 1970s when the US Dietary Goals and food labelling were developed.  Pollan directly links the proliferation of ‘Western diseases’ such as obesity and type II diabetes to these guidelines, arguing that the way they were framed (for example ‘choose meat that will reduce saturated fat intake’ rather that ‘eat less meat’) and presented encouraged people to eat more, not less, and began an eating culture marked by ‘speak no more of food, only nutrients’.  I thought this idea could have been explored in more depth.

Pollan goes on to explore several claims about nutrients such as saturated fats that have been shown to be false, baseless or dangerous. I also thought that Pollan let himself down a little in this section, because while he argues against relying too much on science that reduces food down to nutrients, he seemed to me to be a little selective about the science that backed his claims.  He does list all his references though.

The book also has a short history of the industrialisation of food, which Pollan breaks down into five steps:

• Wholefoods became refined foods
• Complex foods became simple foods
• Quality of food was replaced by quantity of food
• Eating leaves was replaced by eating seeds
• Food culture became food science

This last is Pollan’s jumping off point for what to do about the whole sorry mess.  His point is that food is more than just its constituent nutrients, and that the effect that it has on our bodies comes more by culture than by nutrients (my personal favourite piece of evidence for this thesis is the belt bib).  However he doesn’t delve into this idea in depth.  He winds up with the mantra above: ‘Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants’.

As you’d expect for a journalist, Pollan writes cleanly and crisply, so the book is quick and easy to read.  To some extent I probably enjoyed the book because it confirmed my own prejudices.  But it is interesting and informative and reasonably free from politics and blame games.  The day I finished it I had two unfortunate encounters with the industrial food chain.  The first was a Qantas inflight meal of ‘pizza bits with caesar dip’ which resembled neither pizza nor caesar nor dip.  The second was an executive from CSR, speaking at length about CSR’s new sugar-free sugar and low-GI sugar, both introduced in response to the growing incidence of type II diabetes.  Pollan may well be onto something.

This article in the NY Times is a condensed version of In Defence of Food.  You can also read or watch an interview with Michael Pollan and Kerry O’Brien here, or listen to a podcast from the Sydney Writer’s Festival here.

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan
Penguin, 2008