A critic who gets excited about a novel is, to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, like a man who puts on armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. This is a largely sensible sentiment, and a good way to gauge whether personal biases are clouding a critic's interpretation or opinion of a book, and yet here I stand in chain mail this week to review Neil Stewart's The Test Kitchen, a novel that is infuriatingly brilliant but ultimately let down by its foundations.
The Scottish author's second novel is set during one chaotic, almost frenetic, evening at a fine-dining restaurant in London on a Tuesday in 2013. Set in the minds and surroundings of staff and diners, the polyphonic story unfolds with incredible speed and energy, replicating the tension and thrill of the fine-dining world with style.
Stewart takes readers on a deft, unconventional journey through the Michelin-starred restaurant, helmed by Joanna, a talented chef from Glasgow. From the ash tree at the centre of the dining room, to the plush, understated furniture and the quiet orderliness of the pass-through, the Midgard staff seem to feel they've “never worked in a more dysfunctional place.”
The story centres around Marley, a new waitress at the restaurant. She's an Australian in her twenties who dreams of becoming an actor. To add to this thwarted hope, at the start of the book she is literally trapped in the gap between an industrial refrigerator and the countertop, trapped in a kitchen busy preparing an eight-course tasting menu. Something bad happens to Marley, trapping her in this liminal space, immobilising her, and our eyes and ears are glued to the tumultuous service that unfolds.
The many characters we meet that evening are vividly portrayed, including a precocious 12-year-old boy dining with his warring parents, a neurotic new sous-chef, an acerbic restaurant critic, a former soldier turned chef, and a handsome maître d' whose face is “so beautiful that if you stare at her for too long, the part of your brain that scans for flaws in beauty goes a little haywire.”
Born in Glasgow and living in London, Stewart has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. His first novel, Glasgow Coma Scale, was published in 2014. He has worked freelance as a proofreader and editorial assistant for galleries and museums, and is arts editor for the online magazine Civilian.
His meticulous portrayals of the restaurant industry, the drudgery, creativity, food, lifestyle, friendships and rivalries are reminiscent of novels like Ross Raisin's A Hunger and Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter, but the overall tone and momentum of Test Kitchen has more in common with Chelsea Summers' reckless, murderous satire A Certain Hunger. Stewart's blend of literary prose and elements of genre fiction demonstrates the author's wide range of talent.
This originality and flair is most apparent in the depth of character backstories that range from depraved, funny, to moving, such as a precocious 12-year-old boy trying to get his parents back together; there's also a dessert chef pursued by a one-night stand, a widow harboring a secret affair, a scientist on the brink of allergies, and a clan of brothers grappling with their father's abusive legacy. “His rage was wild, unpredictable, and terrifyingly overflowing, and it undermined his own plans. If his coldness, his aloofness, his sudden bursts of rage, were a strategy to mold his sons into similarly cruel men, or even more so to create and perpetuate an intergenerational cycle of abuse, it failed.”
It's a shame, as this is a book packed with some very clever storytelling, but it needs a cleaner structure and better editing overall. The omniscient narration, at its best, recalls Damon Galgut's excellent novel The Promise, but it often reeks of effort and contrivedness. There are lengthy audible conversations, Dictaphone recordings, reviews, cryptic phone calls, and other metatextual devices, and Marley manages to exploit them all.
The shifts in perspective, along with the wild shifts in time and place, are tolerable early in the novel when there's plenty else to enjoy, but not in the final quarter, when readers expect the author to follow through on what they've set up over the course of the story. Instead, twists and revelations are swallowed up in the scaffolding, or worse, left hanging in limbo. I mean, if Test Kitchen itself were an eight-course tasting menu, we'd all be in heaven by dessert.
