One sister, Emily, is the sensible CEO of a Berkeley data-storage company called Veritech. The other, Jessamine, is a tree-hugging UC-Berkeley philosophy student. Emily's boyfriend Jonathan runs a data-security company in Cambridge. Jessamine's boyfriend? At first there is the radical environmentalist and then there is the wealthy, older former software executive who collects rare books and lives in a spectacular Berkeley Hills home designed by Bernard Maybeck.
"You should hire him for Veritech, when you guys move," Jonathan advises Emily when they attend a party at the book collector's house. "Seriously," he adds—too cool and yet too callow to realize that Maybeck has been dead for decades.
With arch dialogue, sharp characterization and a comfort level with science and technology that eludes many fiction writers, Allegra Goodman nails the culture of the dot-com boom and bust in The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press). A sweeping comedy of manners about Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 technology belt, the novel fully captures the intoxicating madness that swept through that universe from 1999 to 2001.
Goodman, PhD '97, was drawn to the brilliant risk takers who embodied questions of trust, greed and power at the turn of the 21st century, along with the themes of family, friendship and faith that anchored such earlier works as The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. "I always wanted to write about that, even when it was happening," she recalls. "I was fascinated by the boom, the money, the excess."
It is not her first copiously researched venture into techie subject matter. Goodman's 2006 novel, Intuition, took on medical research, with a plot about a postdoc who comes to believe that fellow experimenters have falsified results. The Other Side of the Island, a 2008 novel for teens, looked at global warming and ruined oceans.
All this from a 43-year-old Shakespeare scholar who welcomed a final Cookbook Collector research trip to the Bay Area as a break from her life as the wife of an MIT computer scientist and the mother of four, ages 8 to 17. Even then, irony prevailed: Goodman told the SFO rental car agent she wanted something hot, befitting a mom-on-the-loose. What did she drive out with? "A minivan."
Goodman loves to chuckle at her misadventures, admitting that she often laughs out loud at her own prose. In pursuit of verisimilitude, she once carted her laptop to Home Depot to craft a scene about house renovation. Sometimes, she window-shops for her characters, selecting outfits they might like.
A relentless self-editor, she routinely goes through five or six drafts. She is an observant Jew—her family does not answer the phone or watch television on Saturdays—and because her own deep faith often soaks into her novels, Goodman has sometimes been dubbed "the Jewish Jane Austen."
Goodman enjoys the compliment. Like Austen, she says, "I am interested in character, and I am interested in moral dilemmas." Indeed, Goodman first read Pride and Prejudice in fifth grade, less for the plot than to study its execution.
Goodman's first story was published in Commentary the day she arrived at Harvard from Honolulu in 1985. Goodman, who had worn a muumuu at her bat mitzvah, brought a freshman wardrobe featuring sandals and a thigh-length jacket worn by her mother a generation earlier at Barnard. "Is this as cold as it gets?" she asked her classmates in mid-October. By December, she owned boots.
Her first book, Total Immersion, appeared in 1989, the day she finished Harvard. She married classmate David Karger, MS '92, PhD '95, and they headed west for graduate study. Even while dissecting drama and poetry and thrashing through a dissertation on Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare, Goodman thought of herself as a creative writer, her thesis adviser remembers. English professor Stephen Orgel rejected the first version of Goodman's thesis as too literary. But she ended up writing, he says, "a really original and interesting dissertation, of the kind a more standard graduate student couldn't have done. . . . She's an unusual kind of person, one of the most interesting students I have ever had."
Literary agent Irene Skolnick contacted Goodman the day she read Goodman's first story. What drew her to the fledgling writer, still a college undergraduate, was "that she was brilliantly inventive, humane and funny," Skolnick says. "I think she has a very keen-edged satire, and she writes with linguistic exuberance."
Along with her technology research, Goodman all but moved into famed Schlesinger Library at Harvard as she plotted out The Cookbook Collector—in which a cache of rare cookbooks becomes a pivotal metaphor for the hunger and acquisitiveness that marked the years of IPO fervor. "I was interested in writing about appetites of all kinds—financial, literary, altruistic—and what that does to you. I see the collecting instinct in some ways as parallel to the investing instinct. You keep buying and buying and buying. But what does it get you?"
Besides, she had this idea of writing about someone who collects cookbooks but does not cook. Karger, she admits, does all the cooking in their family. "My work is not autobiographical, but it is highly personal," says Goodman, who is as close to and yet as different from her sister, Paula, an oncologist, as her character Jess is to Emily. "It is not a history of my events, but I am sure the circumstances of my life do inform my stories."
ELIZABETH MEHREN is a journalism professor at Boston University.
