Sometimes it can be difficult to determine what the unifying element of a collection of otherwise unconnected short stories is supposed to be. This is not the case with Madeleine Thien’s debut, Simple Recipes. Although the title strongly indicates that the presence of a thematic thread involving cooking or eating, that is not what the recipes refer to. Admittedly, many of the stories feature scenes of cooking or eating, but those are tangential to the more significant recipe collection alluded to in the book as a whole.
This is a book which offers up a recipe for how to build a happy family. Unfortunately, it is recipe constructed through negation. In other words, learning how make a happy family by reading these stories is like being given a list of the ingredients for making a cake, but without any indication of the proper amount. And so one must first learn how not to make a cake that is too salty or not sweet enough or doesn’t rise during baking or is too dry or too mushy before finally learning how to mix things at least close enough to perfect to make the thing edible. Family after family is presented in these stories which are simply not edible.
Peppered throughout these tales of domestic dysfunction are parents who drink too much, parents who sexually abuse their child, parents who physically abuse their children, actual adulterous lovers, merely desired adulterous loves, parental neglect, estranged relationships and mental health issues. Most of the story are told from the perspective of one of the children of these marriages gone to awry and the portraits painted are of incessant suffering that often goes unobserved and occasionally simmers past the boiling point. It is easy enough to determine the ingredients that make up a happy family through the act of negating the possibility of too much liquor, too much flirtation, not enough attention, etc. Successfully mixing the perfect volume of those ingredients into a simple recipe is another story altogether.
If this description of the narrative makes the collection seem like a horrifically depressing slog through the failures of fictional families to get it right when you have your own family issues to deal with, keep in mind that the saving grace is that the stories are well-written, engaging, and quite possibly exist to fulfill the oldest and most noble of all purposes of literature, as outlined by Aristotle: to instruct readers through replication of their own real-life experiences. If none of the stories can actually be termed to promise a happy ending for the characters, it is perhaps because their circumstances have moved past the point of no return. That may not be the case with those reading them who are looking for a reason to initiate change before the situation in their own lives reaches that point of not being able to save things.
