Soul Kitchen

I really love these books. After the first two books (or three, if you count The Value of X), reading this new one was like visiting old friends. The restaurant setting in New Orleans is a bottomless gumbo pot, full of tasty new situations, characters and plots. Poppy Z. could probably ladle out 20 books in this series without repeating herself. I know I'll find myself reading them again, and I hope that one day they are published in hardcover. The writing style in the Liquor series is a little different than that in PZ's earlier books. I don't know if this was intentional, an artistic decision, or simply evolution. The writing is collorful, direct, somewhat colloquial, concise and exceptionally clear. Going from, say Lost Souls -- which was moody and often waxed poetic, suiting its subject -- to Liquor, you may wonder if you're reading a different author. There is an unmistakable optimism in these books too, which is contageous. Attitude adjustment without alcohol. Nice to come home to after a hard day. Comfort food. I'm looking forward to the next one -- though I know Hurricane Katrina will make it a heartbreaker. Rickey and G-Man will pull through, and we'll all be crying with them.

Poppy Z. Brite is back with a new installment in the Liquor series. Rickey and G-Man are making a success of their New Orleans restaurant, Liquor, despite some turnover in the kitchen. Rickey hires Milton Goodman who has just been released from prison after serving ten years for a murder he did not commit. Rickey hurts his back and sees a quack who overprescribes Vicodin in a bizarre attempt to lure Rickey into consulting for a new restaurant, Soul Kitchen, on a casino boat. The story follows two tracks: what all of this does to the relationship between Rickey and G-Man (which includes a lot more sex than in the previous installment -- thank you!) and the dirty dealings on the casino boat, leading to a nasty surprise for poor Milton. Poppy is at her very best. As noted in a review for a previous book in the series, it is a mark of the skill of her writing that a straight women can so beautifully capture the life and love of two gay men. The dialogue between the characters also reaches new levels of reality and humor. The plot has been kept simpler and cleaner, making even the nefarious dealings easier to follow. And, correcting what was notably absent in the previous books in the series, Poppy actually has G-Man spending nearly two pages questioning the ethics and morality of some of the New Orleans shenanigans. In the introduction the author tells us that Soul Kitchen was completed the night before Katrina blew away and/or drowned New Orleans. As we have come to love these characters, we hope that Poppy will let us know how they and their restaurant have fared ever since.

Soul Kitchen is the funniest, most touching and scariest (Polonius eek) book I've read this year. the character are the most three dimensional people in any series out there. If you've spent any time in New Orleans, you've met these people. The plot and subplots are wound together so naturally with the dialog that you feel like you're watching it all happen. I'm afraid this is probably going to be the last book in the series that can be so light of heart. Two Lower Ninth Ward boys, their Lakeview friend and backer, friends and family aren't going to be able to produce much humor in post-Katrina New Orleans. As dark as the next book in the series has to be, I still look forward to reading it. Call me sentimental but I suspect reading it will help the healing process for those of us who lost everything last summer.

A famous playwright I once knew revealed that his boilerplate comment when meeting the cast, playwright or crew of a show he destested was a boisterous "There's nothing like it in this town!" I was reminded of his comment -- but in a MUCH more positive way! -- when reading SOUL KITCHEN, the sequel to LIQUOR and PRIME, continuing the story of New Orleans chefs Rickey and G-Man. What's so wonderfully unique about what Brite does in these novels (and with even greater skill here) is that she's weaving together (at least) four different kinds of stories, each unique in its own way: a back-of-house exposé, a satire on food fads, a nuanced mature romance, and an account of how New Orleanians live beyond puke-till-you-drop Bourbon Street bars and stately-but-doomed Garden District mansions. Although Anthony Bourdain and various reality TV series have given us a hyped-up version of what goes on in restaurant kitchens (apparently it's not all witty Julia Child-esque banter, as I had assumed), Brite shows us the ordinary aches and pains, the daily grind of turning out those magical dishes. She is equally on her game when she skewers the pretensions of over-hyped chefs who care more about their own egos than giving customers a satisfying experience. There's a scene in one of these trendy shiny dives that had me laughing out loud -- I'll never look at a muffaletta the same way again. And gumbo, that most venerated of New Orleans comfort foods, makes several surprising appearances. In showing us the maturing relationship of Rickey and G-Man, Brite is at her subtlest. What is so compelling about these two? It's that they are the kind of ordinary gay couple we so rarely see in books or the media. Not flamboyant or over-sexed or romantically tormented, they are two people doing their best to love each other in a difficult world. Here they face new challenges, both professional and personal, and do the hard work of continuing to love each other and build a common life. And yet, that is not the greatest gift of this book. Most poignantly, she lays before us the ordinary life of Pre-Katrina New Orleans. (The first draft was finished the night before the storm.) I was reminded of the early volumes of TALES OF THE CITY, telling of the lives of Pre-AIDS San Francisco, its residents blessedly unaware of the disaster to come. So many of the places where this book is set suffered tremendous damage from the storm and the subsequent failure of the levees (the latter, we must not forget, an engineering castrophe, not a natural disaster; but I digress). Like John Kennedy Toole (who is explicitly invoked in the book), Brite is committed to setting before us the lives of ordinary New Orleanians who eat, drink, go to work, and make love in this most beloved of cities. If you want to know what happens beyond the French Quarter and the Garden District (in the 80% of the city that flooded), I can think of no better guide than this book. She shows us why, to echo, Tom Piazza

The LIQUOR books continue and SOUL KITCHEN is a truly fine edition to the series. I completely admit to being hooked on the lives of Rickey and G-man due to the hard-won way their author, Poppy Z. Brite, brings them to life. There is a low-country, unhurried and vernacular-perfect yet completely contemporary elegance to her prose that only comes from intense hard work and much agonizing over each sentence. While many authors are content to distractedly bang out serial novels once an acceptable groove has been found, Brite is one of the rare ones that really believes her creations deserve no less than the best. The attention to detail and the fact her characters live on in my head long after I close the cover means, at least to this reader, that she's one of the rare ones who truly can write about anything she darn well pleases and that will certainly please anyone that appreciates a good read. In SOUL KITCHEN, I was pleased and proud to find that Rickey and G-man have not only had further adventures in the delightfully well-told restaurant world but also have grown emotionally. They've changed in that way many real people wish they could, by facing personal and professional challenges head-on and rising to them, if not rising over them. There are recaps of some of the events in earlier books and I find them to be like looking at favorite pictures again. They help to tie the lives of the characters together in a way that some other authors burden the reader with doing. By including relevant reminders of which chef's knives are on the mantelpieces (so to speak,) it helps to know where things might go in SOUL KITCHEN. And as wonderfully usual in this series, the details of the restaurant world and the food in and around it are very well done, especially since they describe one of the most unusually diverse eating cities known to exist. Brite likely wrote most of this book before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina hit her hometown of New Orleans. It is tempting to link the strength of her characters to her own internal strength and note, in one particular way, that the rest of this series is likely to be even better than the current installment. Especially as it will most likely force Rickey and G-man to deal with a major natural and national disaster, one of the most emotionally demanding things anyone can face on or off the page.