Her uncle Barney undergoes a remarkable awakening in my new novel, What’s Left. Instead of going to college, he stays home and soon finds himself fully responsible for managing the kitchen of the family restaurant.

He has, though, tasted the social upheavals in the wider world and quietly rebelled at the strictures of his parents. The status quo is endangered.

The return of his older brother, Dimitri, changes everything. Barney is pressed to expand the menu into dishes drawn from unfamiliar cuisines, flavors, and ingredients, and that requires mastering more demanding techniques and advancing his ability to taste subtle nuances. All of that puts him at the center of intense debate and experimentation, abetted by his wife, the lively Pia, plus the family circle of Graham, Nita, Yin, and Cassia’s father, even before their business expands into related food fields including a bakery, a brewery, and a natural foods grocery.

It’s a lot to put on his plate, but I know it can be done. Barney has that kind of curiosity, for one thing, and a tongue to match.

As Cassia discovers, in a passage that’s evaporated from the final version:

Barney’s into astrology and palmistry, through the grandmothers. When I ask about drugs, all I’m told is, Not the hard stuff. And even with the Buddhism, for him, hippie is about the music, more than anything else – as you’d hear in Carmichael’s kitchen, night and day.

~*~

Let’s get back to basics. Imagine yourself sitting down with this group for a night off. They’re phoning an order for home delivery. What’s your favorite pizza? Why? Who do you think wants the one with anchovy?

~*~

Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this.

In my new novel, What’s Left, her uncle Dimitri sees qualities in her father-to-be that would fit in with her family – hard worker, loyal to the situation. And so he turns that, in an earlier draft:

You can object all you want, but I know that far down inside, you really don’t love that newspaper or that town.

Frankly, reading that again is personally painful. I’ve done a lot of good work in difficult circumstances. Let’s leave it at that.

~*~

If money – including a job – were no obstacle, where would you really like to be living?

~*~

In the family, Cassia would have had Greek cuisine like this.

Her uncle Graham certainly adds depth to my new novel, What’s Left.

For one thing, he’s a sign of the generational changes coming to the family and its business. Dimitri’s father, Stavros, never would have approved of Graham’s presence, had fate not intervened.

For another, he brings a type of gentle male to the story, a balance to Dimitri’s golden boy leadership. As a couple, they also help me narrow the number of cousins Cassia has close at hand – readers can handle only so many names, after all – and Dimitri and Graham weren’t about to adopt, from what I see. (Feel free to argue otherwise.)

I’m happy with the way Graham grows into the story. Like others who voluntarily join in the family – Cassia’s father and her aunts Pia and Yin – he’s crucial to its vitality and flavor. With the hint of 0ld-money comfort in his past compounded by a layer of black-sheep distancing, we find him rich in the social skills he applies as the face everybody in town comes to know in the family’s restaurant.

And then there’s the close friendship he and Cassia’s father build, based on their shared love of opera, especially.

~*~

Here’s how I portrayed him in an early draft of the novel:

Graham is another story. A year older than Dimitri, he’s far more experienced in the wider world. In settling with us, he no doubt gives up many sophisticated pleasures in exchange for small-town ambience and limitations. It’s not that he exactly needs a job, either. He’s free to work whenever and wherever he wants, or not at all, but here he throws himself into long hours just like the rest of us. If anything, he somehow takes what can be seen as our provincial ways as a personal relief from whatever he’s left behind, or even as some kind of cosmic humor.

~*~

I hadn’t thought about this, but about a year after drafting this, I met someone at a weeklong conference who has many of Graham’s comforting qualities, and we’re good friends now. It’s almost eerie.

Which character do you identify with more – Graham or Dimitri? Or should I ask, which one do you prefer more? And why?

~*~

In my novel, the family restaurant could have been like this.

What would Barney have been without the family restaurant? As the middle brother, he seems content to stay put. While still a teen he masters what it takes to run a burger-and-fries joint and could continue with those skills the rest of his working life. Nor does he display the ambition his other two brothers thrive on, either. In short, he’s more or less happy where he is – especially once Pia brightens his existence.

My new novel, What’s Left, won’t let him rest there long. He’s destined for some greatness of his own.

It’s not that there weren’t conflicts. As I noted in a passage since deleted from the novel:

He could have fled, of course, as his elder brother had. But for whatever reasons, Barney chose to stay and serve. Keep his mouth shut, then, and continue sweeping and chopping and composting.

And so he moves up in the restaurant. Still, he’s been active in antiwar protests, which really pissed off Pappa Stavros. In some ways, you might consider Barney the biggest hippie of the lot, maybe even more than Thea Pia.

~*~

Well, I have some second-cousins who took over my great-uncle’s plumbing business, unlike my dad, who became a corporate accountant instead of continuing my grandfather’s shop.

Individual personalities come into play. I don’t see Barney wanting to handle the money-side of the restaurant business, had all the responsibility fallen on him.

What do you think? Could he have become an auto mechanic? Taken an assembly line job? Something else? Would he have still been happy? Just what was a hippie living at home, anyway? Do you know anyone who’s like Barney?

~*~

Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this.

In my new novel, What’s Left, her uncle Dimitri holds a Master’s of Business Administration degree from Stanford University but acknowledges the value of hands-on learning. As he argues with her father-to-be in a passage I cut from the final version:

Maybe you haven’t recognized you already received a Master’s Degree, in part, from your experience in that old rambling apartment across town, back before you even graduated. Your Ph.D. came on the rails under the big city. Most universities teach speculation, which is completely different from knowledge. What they teach often changes from day to day and hour to hour.

~*~

You know the expression, “Garbage in, garbage out,” and I want to use it as a nickname for a young adult who shows up around here all too often. When his head’s not stuck up his arse, it’s on the Internet.

Continue reading “LEARNING FROM LIFE ITSELF, TOO” →

I can’t imagine What’s Left, my new novel, without her aunt Pia – short for Olympia. She’s one of the characters created especially for this book, unlike the ones we inherited from the end of my first published novel, and she emerges as a parallel to Cassia’s father. At key points, they work together as a sharp creative team in the transformation of the family restaurant and its holdings.

If anyone could pose a romantic rival to Cassia’s mother-to-be, wouldn’t it be Pia?

She’s the flower child, the hippie chick, and then the earth mother – the height of femininity, from one of his perspectives. She also reintroduces Cassia’s family to its ethnic culture, especially the concept of kefi, or living with gusto (and much more). She’s the one the children naturally turn to for comfort or playful. And she has style to spare.

Continue reading “A BIG WELCOME FOR OLYMPIA” →

When her uncle Dimitri turns to an astrological chart as support for his sales pitch to her father-to-be, this passage was included in an early version of my new novel, What’s Left.

Come on now, Dimitri! You don’t expect me to believe any of that mumbo jumbo!

I seem to recall you said the same thing about meditation, back when your lover wanted you to sample it, Nita says, entering the kitchen.

Suppose I was trying to tell you about the subways for the first time, right now? If you hadn’t already tried it, you wouldn’t believe a word I told you.

~*~

I eliminated it from the final version for several reasons. One, I felt that by now her future father was far enough along in his spiritual practice to be ready to listen to arcane thought systems, even if he might challenge their validity. Also, I felt this relied too much on a backstory that was no longer relevant to the work at hand.

But Cassia’s family, from her great-grandmothers on down in the New World, likely felt otherwise.

Have you studied or practiced astrology? Palmistry? Tarot? The coins of I Ching? Some other arcane pathway, like the tea leaves or coffee grounds Cassia’s great-grandmothers might have consulted? Or do you know someone who undertakes any of these? What’s your perspective? Any personal insights?

~*~

Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this.

A crucial moment in my new novel, What’s Left, occurs when her uncle Dimitri tries to convince her father-to-be to quit his career and move in with them, without actually offering him an income or much else.

As I noted in an earlier draft:
Manoula remembers all of this clearly. Says her brother’s chuckle perplexed Baba. Here’s her ensemble extending some kind of ambiguous invitation, on the one hand, and simultaneously affronting his professional portfolio, on the other.

~*~

Unlike Cassia’s Baba, I’ve tended to make big moves like this more deliberately. Even so, some of my moves, in retrospect, still amaze me. Relocating with all of our goods in a U-Haul without an apartment awaiting us halfway across the continent was one of them.

But throw the promise of hot love into the mix? Now it gets interesting!

Tell us some decision you’ve made that might seem irrational to those around you. How did it turn out? Would you do it again, given the chance?

~*~

In the family, Cassia may have had food like this.