DEC - Sweetbitter

December review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, 2016. [Debut Author 2016 category]

Whenever I have a "best of the year" or "new this year" kind of category, I tend to leave it toward the latter half of the challenge, and this time was no exception. I waited until December for my debut author category, and as I was walking around my favorite Minneapolis bookstore when I was there for Thanksgiving, I found Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler.

Sweetbitter is the sort of coming-of-age story for the narrator (whose name we are told is Tess but we often forget...at least I did...) as she transplants herself to New York City and ends up talking her way into a job as a backwaiter at a swanky downtown restaurant. I had a brief brush with restaurant life last summer, and although it was only as a host, I still felt a sort of kinship with Tess and the headiness of that life. (Except for the cocaine. I never did cocaine like Tess did.) The stress and quickness foster a sort of familial connection between the staff members, one I can only imagine being pivotal at 22 years old and freshly new to the city, as Tess is. Sweetbitter chronicles her traversal through the seasons of her first year in New York, a frenetic bacchanal of sorts where she soaks up her new world and relearns all her senses. 

A lot of Tess's education in the restaurant is about wine. I wish I knew more about wine, I wish I'd had the kind of tutelage she experiences under Simone's hawkish eye. I drank up every description, every phrase, and I was especially interested in the concept of "terroir." Terroir is defined as the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors like soil and climate. These contextual characteristics lend the wine a character of its own, past the definitions of its environment, and Sweetbitter explores the metaphorical idea of a person having their own "terroir." The contextual clues that make up a person, that shape them and define them and cage them. Sweetbitter felt like an attempt to define Tess's new terroir: she says on the second page, "Let's say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m.," focusing on a new life, a new person, a new environment. After my own year of change, thinking about my own terroir is enthralling, and Sweetbitter has helped me to do just that. 

Danler is poetic and her turn of phrase enticing, but the slightly flawed and flat characters took away slightly from my enjoyment of the language. All in all, though, a lovely florid read to end my 2016.