'Gulp' doesn't go down well
By Jon Ronson |
May 5, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
AN Italian saliva expert named Erika Silletti recently addressed a dental conference. History doesn't record which aspects of saliva she extolled from the stage that day. Perhaps she described how art conservators are so enamored with its cleaning power they use it to dab fragile artworks. Or maybe she praised the people of Greece - who spit on everything as a sign of good luck - for their saliva-positive attitudes.
What we do know is her speech was a disaster. The assembled dentists regarded her blankly. She returned to her hotel room and burst into tears. "They think of it as lubricating, and that's it!" she complained to her boyfriend.
The Mary Roach who discovered Erika Silletti ("while roaming the abstracts of a dental conference") and makes her such a heroic figure is the Mary Roach I love. Delightful, eccentric scientists, besotted by their spheres of study, light up her pages. So does her childlike wonder for the intricacies of the human body - how it whirs along, keeping us safe for the most part. Over the years she's explored the processes of human decomposition ("Stiff"), sex ("Bonk") and the possibility of an afterlife ("Spook"). With "Gulp," it's the digestive system.
"Like a bite of something yummy," she promises, "you will begin at one end and make your way to the other." A clever conceit, but I wish she'd retained a little narrative mystique. Sure enough, we follow our food from the smelling, the tasting and the swallowing, inexorably downward, "via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history." The taboos have worked in her favor, she writes. "The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined."
Take flatulence. Flatulence could - according to an Alabama snake digestion expert named Stephen Secor - explain one of civilization's most enduring legends. A giant python eats a decomposing gazelle. It dies near a fire. A human steps on it. Hydrogen whooshes out of its mouth and catches light. Perhaps this is how the myth of the fire-breathing serpent came to be. "The oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China," Roach writes, "where the giant snakes are."
There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach - her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners, that giant snake hypothesis. She is beloved, and justifiably so. Which is why I feel churlish, for not enjoying "Gulp" more.
The main problem with "Gulp" is in contrast with death and its aftermath is we are already closely acquainted with our digestive systems. There's the disappointing sense that for every "unusual story" we get a lot of stuff we already know. I kept wondering how many more pages until the colon and the excrement.
What we do know is her speech was a disaster. The assembled dentists regarded her blankly. She returned to her hotel room and burst into tears. "They think of it as lubricating, and that's it!" she complained to her boyfriend.
The Mary Roach who discovered Erika Silletti ("while roaming the abstracts of a dental conference") and makes her such a heroic figure is the Mary Roach I love. Delightful, eccentric scientists, besotted by their spheres of study, light up her pages. So does her childlike wonder for the intricacies of the human body - how it whirs along, keeping us safe for the most part. Over the years she's explored the processes of human decomposition ("Stiff"), sex ("Bonk") and the possibility of an afterlife ("Spook"). With "Gulp," it's the digestive system.
"Like a bite of something yummy," she promises, "you will begin at one end and make your way to the other." A clever conceit, but I wish she'd retained a little narrative mystique. Sure enough, we follow our food from the smelling, the tasting and the swallowing, inexorably downward, "via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history." The taboos have worked in her favor, she writes. "The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined."
Take flatulence. Flatulence could - according to an Alabama snake digestion expert named Stephen Secor - explain one of civilization's most enduring legends. A giant python eats a decomposing gazelle. It dies near a fire. A human steps on it. Hydrogen whooshes out of its mouth and catches light. Perhaps this is how the myth of the fire-breathing serpent came to be. "The oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China," Roach writes, "where the giant snakes are."
There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach - her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners, that giant snake hypothesis. She is beloved, and justifiably so. Which is why I feel churlish, for not enjoying "Gulp" more.
The main problem with "Gulp" is in contrast with death and its aftermath is we are already closely acquainted with our digestive systems. There's the disappointing sense that for every "unusual story" we get a lot of stuff we already know. I kept wondering how many more pages until the colon and the excrement.
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