Candy capers vivid and violent
By Jincy Willett |
January 17, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ALTHOUGH we have always craved sweets, until the Industrial Revolution many of us made do with candy manufactured by bees, that most industrious of species. Factories and assembly lines made modern candy at once possible and necessary, even though candy contains few nutrients and is bad for our teeth.
Now that we're all fat and the earth is melting, we're supposed to be off candy for good. Ordinary candy is just for Halloween; high-end candy, nestled in luxury boxes, is marketed as a sex substitute. But Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, the narrator of Katharine Weber's new novel, "True Confections," knows better. Candy makes people happy.
Alice, the distinctly unhappy daughter of repressed New England Protestants, gratefully marries into the immigrant Ziplinsky family, whose company, Zip's Candies, produces Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos and Tigermelts. She takes to both the family and the business with zealous fealty. Transforming herself into a model Jewish wife, she learns all the rules, recipes, holidays. Under the guidance of her father-in-law, she learns the candy business inside out.
There are two narratives at work here. One is about Alice's doomed attempt to assimilate into the Ziplinskys and her husband's ultimate betrayal. The other, even more compelling, concerns candy itself: how some of the brands we remember so vividly owed their existence to the kitchen experiments of immigrants. Eli Czaplinsky, the founder of Zip's, a street tough who may have been involved with the crime boss Lepke Buchalter, gets his inspiration for Little Sammies from thumbing obsessively through "Little Black Sambo" while on the lam.
"True Confections" isn't a rollicking novel, since Alice isn't the rollicking type, but it's got everything: humor, treachery, class struggle, racism, murder, capitalism and mass quantities of candy. Dieting readers may suffer. Others, after turning the last page, may find themselves online, researching the origins of their own dimly remembered childhood treats. Wax lips, it turns out, owed their waxiness to paraffin supplied by, among others, the Quaker State Oil Refining Company. The business of America is candy. "True Confections" is a great American tale.
Now that we're all fat and the earth is melting, we're supposed to be off candy for good. Ordinary candy is just for Halloween; high-end candy, nestled in luxury boxes, is marketed as a sex substitute. But Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, the narrator of Katharine Weber's new novel, "True Confections," knows better. Candy makes people happy.
Alice, the distinctly unhappy daughter of repressed New England Protestants, gratefully marries into the immigrant Ziplinsky family, whose company, Zip's Candies, produces Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos and Tigermelts. She takes to both the family and the business with zealous fealty. Transforming herself into a model Jewish wife, she learns all the rules, recipes, holidays. Under the guidance of her father-in-law, she learns the candy business inside out.
There are two narratives at work here. One is about Alice's doomed attempt to assimilate into the Ziplinskys and her husband's ultimate betrayal. The other, even more compelling, concerns candy itself: how some of the brands we remember so vividly owed their existence to the kitchen experiments of immigrants. Eli Czaplinsky, the founder of Zip's, a street tough who may have been involved with the crime boss Lepke Buchalter, gets his inspiration for Little Sammies from thumbing obsessively through "Little Black Sambo" while on the lam.
"True Confections" isn't a rollicking novel, since Alice isn't the rollicking type, but it's got everything: humor, treachery, class struggle, racism, murder, capitalism and mass quantities of candy. Dieting readers may suffer. Others, after turning the last page, may find themselves online, researching the origins of their own dimly remembered childhood treats. Wax lips, it turns out, owed their waxiness to paraffin supplied by, among others, the Quaker State Oil Refining Company. The business of America is candy. "True Confections" is a great American tale.
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