Reservations Recommended: A Novel - Softcover

Kraft, Eric

3.8

71 ratings by Goodreads

9780312135973: Reservations Recommended: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312135971 ISBN 13: 9780312135973

Publisher: Picador, 1995

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Reservations Recommended is many things: a satire of the critical mind; a dark commentary on contemporary culture; a story of midlife crisis; a morality play; and a book that matches bleakness against humor with a grace rare among contemporary writers. Matthew Barber is a pseudonymous Boston restaurant reviewer who between (and sometimes during) meals at local eateries conducts affairs with ladies of his acquaintance -- affairs mental as much as carnal. We watch as Barber descends from his self-protective superiority into a species of madness, careening toward an ending of stark moral ambiguity. Woven throughout with Barber's own hilariously acid reviews, Reservations Recommended is Eric Kraft's most fearless venture into the dark night of the soul.

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Matthew never takes notes in a restaurant. That's one of his cardinal rules: Never take notes. He's worried that if he were seen taking notes he'd be identified as a reviewer, and it's important to him that he not be identified. He's also a little worried that if he were identified as a reviewer there would be some kind of scene, a row. He knows that that's not likely to happen, but still it does worry him at times. Worries aside, he enjoys feeling that he's not himself when he's reviewing. He signs his reviews B. W. Beath, a short version of Bertram W. Beath, an anagram of his own name, Matthew Barber.

From Publishers Weekly:

With the protagonist of this novel, 43-year-old Matthew Barber, a recently divorced toy company executive who's also an undercover restaurant critic, Kraft examines a more constricted world than he did in the effervescent Herb 'n' Lorna. Matthew haunts the dining establishments of Boston--often in the company of girlfriend Belinda--and, as B. W. Beath, writes sardonic reviews for a trendy local paper. Although he's successful in both lines of work and enjoys uninhibited, frequent sex with Belinda, the failure of his marriage (and a childhood as a fat boy) have left Matthew with serious self-doubts. In chapters organized around restaurant visits and capped by reviews, Kraft charts the collapse of Matthew's habitual timidity (kept in place with assorted macho fantasies) under the louder and louder blandishments of his alter ego B.W. Kraft's observant eye, his sure approach to sex, his wit--Matthew deplores what he calls his adequacy complex--are here, but the inventiveness that lifted his earlier work out of the ordinary isn't. Heed the title.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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