Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes is a book about families, but it is also a book about the difficulty we experience in really understanding the people we love.
The stories are quiet, sometimes even understated, yet they carry an emotional force that accumulates from one story to the next. Over the course of the collection of seven stories, Thien creates a distance between what family members mean to one another and what they are actually able to say.
The title story, “Simple Recipes,” is one that establishes that tension. It begins with the ordinary situation of a father teaching his daughter how to make rice. The instructions are simple and ritualistic for this staple of their evening meals, and the child remembers her father through those domestic details.
But the tenderness of the lesson she experiences in the kitchen exists alongside something darker: the father’s violent treatment of his son.
The daughter is left with the task of holding both of these versions of her father in her mind — the patient and loving father who teaches her something useful and the frightening, unpredictable father capable of such cruelty.
That contradiction becomes one of the collection’s central ideas. In Thien’s stories, we do not find characters that we can characterize as either good or bad — the kind or the cruel. The author shows through the stories what it means to love someone whose actions have made that love difficult.
There is a magic trick with Thien as her prose — what it says or doesn’t say — also lets the memory of the character do that work.
“Dispatch,” is another story that takes that same question — this time, into a marriage. A woman discovers a letter in which her husband has confessed his love for another woman, Charlotte. Charlotte discourages the man in a reply she sends back to him (along with his own letter). Then Charlotte dies in a car accident. What follows is not a conventional story of infidelity. There isn’t any — not really. But there is a kind of betrayal — and even a kind of forgiveness. But who's forgiving whom?
The wife becomes preoccupied with the woman she never knew, imagining her life and her final journey, while trying to understand what remains of her own marriage. But what is so affecting is that we want to know, too — even while we ask ourselves why anyone would put themselves through such a ghost hunt, such a riddle with no answer whatsoever, a game with no beginning and no end.
Another mystery is when we see that the wife now is free of any competition. She can stay with her husband. He’s contrite.
However, staying with her husband is not presented as simple. Leaving would not erase what has happened. Grief, guilt, love and betrayal become tangled together. Maybe they always were that way.
Another layer of interest is that the story’s narration is second person point of view. What that manages is a distance for the wife — between herself and everything else. But things become strangely intimate, too, that way.
Thien writes about large subjects — immigration, marriage, violence, disappointment, memory and belonging — without making the stories feel like arguments about those subjects. She stays close to ordinary things — rice, letters, marriages. Her characters are trying to make sense of lives that have not followed any simple recipe.
The memorable stories in Simple Recipes are about people who cannot entirely explain themselves to one another — or perhaps to themselves. The result is a collection that trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty, where love, hurt and memory rarely resolve themselves neatly — no, never resolve themselves neatly. These people and their quiet love, pain and fears feel so familiar.
