Books on Monday: What's For Dinner?
NYRB – the reprint arm of the New York Review of Books – continues to crank out brilliant Twentieth-Century titles that have long since disappeared into the black hole of the Great American Mid List. With the passage of time, these books are ripe for reconsideration apart from the brouhaha amidst which they were born (whether it was about them or not). New York poet James Schuyler’s What’s For Dinner? is a perfect example of the surprising book that one encounters in this series. It is a satirical novel, in its way, but it is too deeply amoral to have anything to do with social criticism. In other words, its satire is profound, and very amusing. Never has anyone better captured the sheer heartlessness of post-coital badinage – or more accurately measured its cooling off.
