Chowing down

Jim Crace, author of "Being Dead" and literary fiction's most eloquent atheist, talks about his optimistic embrace of the natural world, the art of lying and why half his new book is about food poisoning.

By Laura Miller

Oct. 29, 2001 | It's impossible to anticipate what the next Jim Crace book will be like. He's written a novel set in a Stone Age village, another about Jesus' sojourn in a Middle Eastern desert, another about the corpses of a murdered, middle-aged married couple decomposing on a sand dune (that one, "Being Dead," won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction and was one of Salon's favorite books of 2000) and now his latest book is an impish collection of very short stories, each related to food and eating. Crace dropped by Salon's New York offices at the end of his tour for "The Devil's Larder" to tell us about his own idiosyncratic take on the relationship between human beings and their comestibles.

What made you decided to write a book of very short fictions about food?

As a writer, I just write the next book in line, and sometimes I can't tell why it's next in line. It comes as much a surprise to me as it does to the reader. It's like the weather. If I try to dig around and figure out why I wound up with this book, I think maybe it's because the two previous books were quite heavy companions, quite hard companions. "Quarantine" was about the existence of God, good and evil and such things. It had quite a high level of death in it. And then the next book, "Being Dead," was about death, as you can tell from the title, and my own father's death was grinning at me from over my shoulder while I was writing. I needed a break. I felt instinctively that I wanted to do something playful and something made up of small ingredients that I could just enjoy. I wasn't just doing that for me. For once, I was thinking of the reader. I figured if I needed a break, the readers needed a break. And what could be more inherently light-hearted and comic than food? Well, sex, of course, but that's my next topic.

It's a playful book, I'll grant you that, but when I first heard it was a book about food, I assumed that it would have, like most literary writing about food these days, an almost self-conscious focus on sensuality. People talk about how food has replaced sex as a topic for sensual writing.

Or music even. People are now using terms to describe a pot of soup that they once used to describe a bit of symphony.

I don't know why I should be, but I was surprised -- when I expected the book to be sort of simple-mindedly celebratory and life-affirming -- by how much rotten, poisoned and inedible food there is in it.

I'm surprised that you don't find it life-affirming. But then I'm always surprised when readers of my books think that they're pessimistic. I'm startled by that. I think all my books are drenched in optimism. I'm very cynical about the Hollywood version of optimism, which says that we all look like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, that good looks and virtue are the same thing, that people are easy to like. I think that's deeply cynical. I think that the world has a lot of dark corners to it, a lot of sour noises, and yet despite that we can look in those places and listen to those noises and come up with an optimistic view of the universe. And that's what I've applied to this book as well as to all my other books. This book is full of sour noises, and full of poisons and toxins and bad meals and bad encounters. But for me the overall feeling is that this is a tender book. There are relationships that work. Mums do love their children. There are marriages that last.

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