Reflexions

Forget it. Mr. Olney was a memorable writer about food and wine, and several of his books are culinary classics that will be read long after this one is deservedly forgotten. Unless for some reason you are minutely interested in the amours and quarrels of Mr. Olney, his friends, and his enemies, order one of his other books instead.

Egads, here by his own hand we see for ourselves what a nasty, petty, vindictive man Mr. Olney was. On and on and on we read of "friendships" with people he can't stand yet who stay in his life year after year after year. Why, we wonder? Mr. Olney reveals himself to be a loner, probably not very happy in the world, who lived off a family allowance or inheritance (we're never quite sure) until the early 1970s when his reputation for someone who knows food and wine launches him into cookbook writing (generally successfully, though not a real "name" like, say, Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher, both of whom he detests). What we're left with here is a self-portrait of a man who didn't fit in, who was elitist and petty and mean-spirited, and the one pleasure of this book is that he's so nasty we can't look away until the end, like watching a car accident. The early part of the book works well as a portrait of a young homosexual painter with a trust fund "struggling" as he eeks out a Bohemian life before finding and moving into a house in the countryside. Again and again we are told of people trying to seduce him and yet he never takes anyone up on this. What, are we to believe he never had sex after his first black lover and he part ways? This functions well as a look into the catty inner circle of the food world, but in the end, all I felt was pity for Mr. Olney, a man who never fit in and who seemed to take pleasure only in the superficial. Perhaps, I'm wrong, but that's the way it reads in this book, which by the way starts out like a book and then becomes mostly a collection of diary entries and letter excerpts. I'm glad I read it. You may find it interesting as I did. But I simply didn't LIKE Mr. Olney at all reading between the lines, and I suspect that's why he has so much antipathy toward seemingly everyone, because they didn't like him either.