Sweetbitter (Danler)

Sweetbitter 
Stephanie Danler, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101875940


Summary
A lush, raw, thrilling novel of the senses about a year in the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, seductive world of a famous New York City restaurant.

"Let's say I was born when I came over the George Washington Bridge..." This is how we meet unforgettable Tess, the twenty-two-year-old at the heart of this stunning debut.

Shot from a mundane, provincial past, Tess comes to New York in the stifling summer of 2006. Alone, knowing no one, living in a rented room in Williamsburg, she manages to land a job as a "backwaiter" at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant.

This begins the year we spend with Tess as she starts to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing, and privileged life she has chosen, as well as the remorseless and luminous city around her. What follows is her education: in oysters, Champagne, the appellations of Burgundy, friendship, cocaine, lust, love, and dive bars.

As her appetites awaken—for food and wine, but also for knowledge, experience, and belonging—we see her helplessly drawn into a darkly alluring love triangle. With an orphan’s ardor she latches onto Simone, a senior server at the restaurant who has lived in ways Tess only dreams of, and against the warnings of coworkers she falls under the spell of Jake, the elusive, tatted up, achingly beautiful bartender.

These two and their enigmatic connection to each other will prove to be Tess’s most exhilarating and painful lesson of all.

Stephanie Danler intimately defines the crucial transition from girl to woman, from living in a place that feels like nowhere to living in a place that feels like the center of the universe. She deftly conjures the nonstop and purely adrenalized world of the restaurant—conversations interrupted, phrases overheard, relationships only partially revealed. And she evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, the fragility and brutality of being young in New York with heart-stopping accuracy.

A lush novel of the senses—of taste and hunger, seeing and understanding, love and desire—Sweetbitter is ultimately about the power of what remains after disillusionment, and the transformation and wisdom that come from our experiences, sweet and bitter. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1983-1984
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., New School
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles

Stephanie Danler is an American author, whose debut novel, Sweetbitter, was publishsed in 2016 to both great anticipation and acclaim.

Like her young narrator-herone Tess, Danler came to New York City in her early twenties and worked in restaurants. It was a job she continued up through her late twenties as a way to support herself while getting her MFA at New York's New School.

How she got her book published is the stuff of fairy tales. The story goes that Danler, then working in a West Village restaurant, approached one of the diners, who happened to be a top publisher, and pitched her book. Being polite, he agreed to take a look at it and was later "stunned" by its language, and polish. A high six-figure advance followed, and Sweetbitter was published some 18 months later.

Danler has since left New York and now lives in a 1920's cottage in the Laurel Canyons section of Los Angeles, where she writes, cooks and entertains.

Book Reviews
Ms. Danler is a sensitive observer of the almost wartime camaraderie among workers at a restaurant that's humming at full capacity, of the exhaustion, of the postshift drinking in dive bars until dawn, of the sex and other stimulants—the biggest one simply being young and alive and open to the animal and intellectual possibilities that New York offers…. Ms. Danler is a gifted commenter…on many things, class especially…. Sweetbitter grows darker than you might expect, in terms of where Tess's desires lead her. It's a book about hunger of every variety, even the sort that can disturb you and make you sometimes ask yourself, as does Tess, "Was I a monster or was this what it felt like to be a person?"
New York Times - Dwight Garner


[O]utstanding…. Stephanie Danler's first novel, Sweetbitter, is the Kitchen Confidential of our time, written from the cleaner and infinitely more civilized front-of-the-house perspective…It would be a tired story if it weren't so, well, for one thing true and for another so brilliantly written. A coked-out girl who sees the sun come up as many times as Tess does might cause her writer to run out of metaphors for unwelcome daybreak…but Danler never does, and her description of the panic of the unannounced health department inspection was so engrossing to read, I missed a flight even though I had already checked in and was waiting at the gate…. Tess is a character you root for and collude with. Danler has a deeply endearing habit of inviting you, the reader, to participate in Tess's own becoming.
New York Times Book Review - Gabrielle Hamilton


Danler's novel paints a visceral, evocative portrait of what it's like to move to New York in your early twenties. Her spot-on descriptions of New York 10 years ago and Tess's evolution from naif to world-weary server, all in just one year, elevate Sweetbitter—the opposite of "Bittersweet"—above its chic-lit trappings into an irresistible coming-of-age tale that can truly be savored.
Mae Anderson - Associated Press


Sweetbitter...dresses the bones of a classic coming-of-age story with the lusty flesh and blood of a bawdy early twenty-first-century picaresque.... Danler...quickly draws you into the sparkling surfaces and the shadowy underbelly of the city... [Tess's] insatiable hunger for tactile, sensual satisfaction dares you to tag along. The journey is high-minded and dirty, beastly and bountiful.
Elle
 

Danler’s ravishing debut is like inhabiting the heady after-midnight hours of a city drunk on its own charms… [Her] descriptions of food and drink go beyond mouth-watering, verging on orgasmic…a first novel [that] tantalizes, seduces, satisfies.
Leigh Haber - O Magazine


Sweetbitter is the rare novel that transcends its hype.... Come for the Meyer-lemon-tart narrator, Tess; stay for author Danler’s lush and precise writing about food, drugs, and dives.
New York


Danler can be a brilliant observer of the city; she can make dialogue snap; she is unafraid to give us a protagonist whose drive can be monstrous.
Newsday


Tess’s sensual awakening to food: creamy, ash-dusted cheeses; anchovies drenched in olive oil; dense, fleshy figs like "a slap from another sun-soaked world" [is] the book’s true romance—the heady first taste of self-discovery, bitter and salty and sweet.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] quintessential coming-of-age story.... [Tess] defines the foods and condiments that are sweet and those that are bitter—and her relationships...are ultimately just that... Danler evokes Tess’s...with deft skill. This novel is a treat.
Publishers Weekly


Danler's debut captures the wild abandon of youth set free in a environment where there are no rules. The characters are well drawn, realistic, and enigmatic. Tess's fresh outlook contrasts with the jaded lives of the other employees. —Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Library Journal


(Starred review.) From her very first sentences...Danler aims to mesmerize, to seduce, to fill you with sensual cravings. She also offers the rare impassioned defense of Britney Spears. As they say at the restaurant: pick up!
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The title appears within one of the novel’s epigraphs, a quote from a poem by Sappho: "Eros once again limb-­loosener whirls me / Sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up." How does this fit into Tess’s story?

2. On page 4, Tess likens the Hudson River to Lethe. According to Greek mythology, the dead drink from Lethe to forget their previous lives. On page 13, in her interview with Howard, Tess says, "Or maybe it means we’ve forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that’s the big grown-­up secret to survival." What is Tess trying to forget?

3. Throughout the novel, Tess considers the idea that she is a "fifty-­one percenter," whose optimistic warmth, intelligence, work ethic, empathy, and self-­awareness and integrity made her uniquely qualified to work at the restaurant. How does this concept figure into her developing sense of herself, and her coworkers? Does it prove to be a good thing?

4. Simone is prone to lecturing Tess philosophically. (Appetite "cannot be cured. It’s a state of being, and like most, has its attendant moral consequences." [page 62] "Your senses are never inaccurate—­it’s your ideas that can be false." [page 78]) What do these proclamations tell us about Simone’s character? And what do we learn about Tess?

5. "The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don’t know what you don’t know" (page 89). What secrets does Tess develop? Do they help her, or hurt her?

6. What does Simone mean when she tells Tess, "And you want to take every experience on the pulse" (page 95)? And when Tess repeats that phrase to Jake on page 145, why does he say, "You’re too malleable to be around [Simone]"?

7. The concept of "terroir" appears several times in the novel. On page 133, Tess wonders if people can have it. Which characters do you think have terroir? Can a book have it?

8. At what point does it become clear to the reader that Tess has developed a problem with drugs and alcohol? When does she realize it?

9. Simone and Jake each influence Tess greatly. Whose influence proves more beneficial, and whose is more damaging? What does she want from each of them? What does she get?

10. On page 196, Tess tells Jake, "You’re all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you’ve taken as you’ve grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don’t have to compromise yet. I don’t have to do a single thing I don’t want to do. That’s why you hate me." What do you think of her assessment?

11. Several of Tess’s coworkers assign to her nicknames of their own devising—­"new girl," "Skipper," "Fluffer," "little one." The reader doesn’t even learn her real name until page 216. What do these names have in common? Are they terms of endearment, or belittling?

12. What role does Howard play in Tess’s coming of age? What does he see in her that she hasn’t yet seen in herself?

13. Tess and Simone each came to New York at twenty-­two. How were their paths similar, and how were they different?

14. Tess and Jake both grew up motherless. Simone becomes a mother figure for each. Which of them gets the most out of the relationship: Tess, Jake, or Simone?

15. Why does Samantha’s appearance at the restaurant affect Simone so deeply?

16. Why does discovering Simone’s key tattoo affect Tess so deeply?

17. When examining the photographs pinned to Jake’s wall, Tess thinks, "It reminded me, the way he skirted around those photos, of something Simone had told me during one of our lessons: try not to have ideas about things, always aim for the thing itself. I still did not understand these four photographs, the why of them" (page 291). What does this passage mean? What does she want to know?

18. Why does Tess feel so betrayed when she learns about Jake and Simone’s planned sabbatical? How does the timing, coinciding with the restaurant’s closing, affect her response?

19. Over the course of the novel, Tess devotes herself to studying wine—­but after she shares her thoughts on Beaujolais, Mrs. Neely says, "Child, what is wrong with you? There’s no roses in the damn wine. Wine is wine and it makes you loose and helps you dance. That’s it. The way you kids talk, like everything is life or death" (page 335). What does this exchange do for Tess? What does Mrs. Neely represent?

20. When Sasha tells Tess about the reality of Jake and Simone’s relationship, why is she surprised?

21. Why does Tess have sex with Howard?

22. Regularly throughout the novel, the author interrupts Tess’s storytelling with collections of overheard fragments of conversation. What purpose do these poetic interludes serve? What does the final one represent?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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