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wine

Book & Bottle #3: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner paired with Il Fait Soif Côtes du Rhône

Posted on May 11, 2019

Book & Bottle pairs books with wine—a surrogate for my fantasy of one day owning a combination bookstore and wine bar.

In retrospect, choosing Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room as the subject for one of a series that pairs books and wine may have been foolish, or at least open to misinterpretation. The novel’s protagonist, Romy Hall, is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus six years in prison for killing her stalker, a customer of hers at the Mars Room, a San Francisco strip club from which the novel takes its title. Much of the action takes place in a high-security prison, the fictional Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in California’s Central Valley, and in highlighting the inhumanity of the place and the circumstances of its inhabitants, Kushner is also making her case for prison reform. That is to say: I could imagine how a person would find it crass to endeavor to pair wine, whose trappings of tastings, vintages, and cellars can be the stuff of the worst kind of middle-class one-upmanship, with a book that makes the point that the bourgeoisie needs to pull its head out of its ass about the evils of the prison industrial complex.

But bear with me here, because in The Mars Room, alcohol, along with food and books, is as plausible an entry point to understanding the world of prison as it is to understanding the more rarefied echelons of society in books like Brideshead Revisited or The Great Gatsby. It’s just that in prison it’s the scarcity of these items that makes them significant. And as with the outside world, they become items people on the inside use to assert their identity and place in the pecking order.

For example, only prisoners with neither money nor visitors eat in the chow hall, where they are allowed ten minutes in enforced silence to do so. The lucky ones dine on microwave hamburgers from vending machines in the visiting area or buy ramen from the canteen. (I appreciate the symmetry here with the fact that “craft” versions of both these foods have become urban restaurant staples in recent years.) Romy has no money, but she learns to uses her prison woodshop responsibility for the CALPIA (California Prison Industry Authority) branding iron to hustle, toasting other prisoners’ bologna sandwiches in exchange for instant coffee.

For more potent drink, necessity is the mother of invention. A recipe for “punch” requires convincing inmates to set aside their psych meds, hiding them in a dab of peanut butter on the roof of the mouth during pill call. The stash of unswallowed pills is then dissolved in iced tea, the results of which culminate in a prison-block party that’s one of the few moments of release for the women in the entire book. As with hamburgers and ramen, I couldn’t help noticing a parallel in my own neighborhood in San Francisco—awash with young people working in tech—where there’s a bar that specializes in punch bowls at $50 a pop. On any given night you can find a group of twenty-something men in hoodies huddled around a picnic table ladling out Southern Hospitality, a punch made of bourbon, peach, lemon, soda, and, yes, iced tea.

Those of us on the outside may have Napa and Sonoma, but Betty LaFrance—former purported Hanes Her Way pantyhose model, current death row inmate convicted of both a hit on her husband and a hit on his hitman—has a different method for making her prison wine. Using a recipe of juice boxes, ketchup packets, and a sock stuffed with bread for the yeast, she distributes her pruno in shampoo bottles via the plumbing system to Romy and her cellmate, Sammy, taking care to ensure their experience is as classy as possible under the circumstances. Even on death row, Betty has a reputation to maintain:

That’s the best hooch at Stanville but you got double-decant it, honey,” Betty shouted to us up the air vent. “Don’t forget to decant. It’s got to breathe.’

Betty sent up a wineglass next, the plastic kind with a screw-on base.
“Where the hell did she this glass?

“The regular way,” Sammy said. “The vault or canoe.”

Women smuggled heroin, tobacco, and cell phones from visiting inside their vaginas and rectums. Betty was smuggling plastic stemware.

Tableware as a symbol of power emerges earlier in the book when Romy recalls an experience that led her to realize she preferred lap dancing to being a paid date, the so-called “girlfriend experience” coveted by many of her colleagues at the strip club.

You start outward, some prick had said to me once about silverware. It wasn’t a thing I’d ever learned, or been taught. He was paying me for the date with him, and in this exchange he felt he didn’t get his money’s worth unless he found small ways to try to humiliate me over the course of the evening.

Romy takes her revenge on her way out of the guy’s hotel room by stealing a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue stuffed with expensive presents for his wife, dumping them in the trash on the way to her car.

Alcohol signifies shifts in hierarchy that favor Romy when, later in the novel, she moves to Los Angeles to try to evade her stalker (not the silverware-police guy). Here she receives unwanted attention from the Guatemalan plumber at her sublet, who invites her to a Mexican restaurant to drink flaming margaritas. When she declines, blaming the headache-inducing properties of the lighter fluid, he re-ups with an offer to go drink white wine, figuring she “was that classy white wine type.” Romy declines, telling him she has to go to work to spare his feelings. Used to being at the wrong end of the power dynamic, she wields her control here with empathy.

***

Like booze, books also play a role in the power dynamics of the prison ecosystem, including the people who work there. Besides Romy, one of the novel’s most developed characters is Gordon Hauser, who has given up on his pursuit of a doctorate in English literature and ended up teaching in the prison system, where despite his better judgement he’s developed a habit of falling for his students.

If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too.

Gordon sends Romy books from Amazon, which puts her in the ranks of prisoners who receive packages and, by extension, means they have family and friends supporting them from outside. But more than status, the distraction of the content is welcome given the prison library’s catalog is limited to the Bible.

Gordon’s first earnest attempt to select books for Romy falls flat. My Ántonia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are books she’s already read, but at least she’s able to trade them for the prison luxuries of shampoo and conditioner. His subsequent choices for her, including Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son are better. Even though Romy is grooming Gordon to try to help her with her young son, Jackson, she genuinely enjoys his GED-prep class (despite having already graduated from high school) and the books. Later, when Gordon leaves the prison to go to graduate school in social work, Romy reflects on him:

Hauser was earnest and gentle. He would have made a good father. I had no way to get in touch with him to tell him so, and the joke had been on me, even as I thought I was using and manipulating him.

Her attempt to get Gordon to intercede on Jackson’s behalf had fallen flat, but not before she’d gotten him to smuggle her a pair of wire cutters. I don’t think it spoils the ending of a book set in prison to note that the wire cutters ultimately do more to uncage Romy than the books.

***

What wine then to pair with reading The Mars Room? One night while I was reading the book, I went to dinner and ordered a glass of Côtes du Rhône. I like Côtes du Rhône, which probably has something to do with the fact that I learned how to pronounce it early in my wine-drinking days—unlike Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Condrieu, the former of which I only learned how to say when the Beastie Boys featured it in a song lyric and the latter of which I still haven’t mastered. Full of the euphoria of one glass of wine and not too much food, I left the restaurant with the conviction that another glass was just what I needed to accompany the reading I had planned for the rest of my evening. I headed to a wine store and, sticking with a theme, selected a $24 bottle of Côtes du Rhône called Il Fait Soif.

As I paid, the clerk complimented my jacket, a purple velvet Gap blazer circa 2006 with one shoulder faded from having been stored in a closet with a west-facing window. She then complimented my choice of wine, pointing out it was “natural” as if to give me credit for selecting something farmed organically, a fact that wasn’t even mentioned on the bottle. Her undeserved compliments were transparently part of her job, and we were both willing participants in the charade surrounding a retail transaction in which the clerk’s role is to make you feel good about your purchase. My status as a customer at a semi-fancy shop secured my right to be fêted, however fleetingly.

It was an example of the subtle experience of privilege that happens to me multiple times a day, only this time I noticed it because it reminded me of the opposite of most of Romy’s interactions in life. In particular, it stood out in contrast to Romy’s denigration by the “square from Silicon Valley,” who paid her for a date that included an etiquette lesson on which piece of cutlery to use. He’s the kind of guy who would have rules about what wine goes with what dish, who would have memorized particular vintages to sound impressive when ordering, who most certainly would have corrected Romy if she mispronounced the name of a wine. He would not have appreciated the casual recommendation on the vintner’s website to drink Il Fait Soif “when feeling thirsty!”

The wine itself is a blend of 80% Grenache and 20% Syrah and drinks easy. Google later informed me that its name, Il Fait Soif, translates as “it’s thirsty work,” and that the winemakers are a woman, Michèle Aubèry-Lauren, and her son, whose name is on the bottle as the producer. I could spin some awkward logic out the translated name and the female stewardship of the wine to justify it as my choice to pair with The Mars Room, but it’s really just the lack of affectation about both the wine and its marketing that make it a good fit. Romy decidedly has flaws, but you’re still rooting for her throughout, including when she’s trashing Silicon Valley Square’s expensive gifts for his wife. Il Fait Soif is a metaphorical middle finger to such perpetrators of pretension.

Book & Bottle #1: The Wine Lover’s Daughter by Anne Fadiman paired with Burgundy & Bordeaux

Posted on February 27, 2019

The fantasy of owning a combination bookstore and wine bar has long buoyed me through bouts of tedium that are part of corporate life. The shop would be enlivened by a roster of visiting authors, and we would pair wines with their books for reading/tasting events. While this venture remains unrealized for now, I’ve started mentally preparing by pairing wine with my own reading list and writing down the results. In short, I have concocted an elaborate ruse to drink more wine and read more books.

*Blundering through Bordeaux & Burgundy (with Bake Off on TV in the background)*

It’s hard to think of a book that suggests itself more for a series about pairing wine with words than Anne Fadiman’s memoir, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, which aims to preserve her father, the late Clifton Fadiman, in the public memory. Fadiman was a prolific book critic, editor, and writer, as well as popular radio host and committed oenophile. His daughter writes of him:

My father had long associated books and wine; they both sparked conversation, they were both a lifetime project, they were both pleasurable to shelve, they were the only things he collected.

I first came across Clifton Fadiman through the book he co-wrote with John S. Major, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, a compendium of no less an ambitious topic than world literature. He also co-authored, with Sam Aaron, The Joys of Wine, a similarly ambitious encyclopedia of wine. Ambition, or at least extreme industriousness, was a theme in Fadiman’s life. As Anne Fadiman explains, “That’s how he afforded the wine.”

Clifton Fadiman was the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster at age twenty-eight and the book critic of The New Yorker at twenty-nine. Before that he worked his way through Columbia, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1925. Next he secured an assignment to translate Nietszche in order to finance a trip to Paris, where his first wife had run off with a member of the Italian aristocracy. Their marriage ended, but not before his then-wife facilitated Fadiman’s Damascene moment with wine: an inexpensive bottle of white Graves ordered with lunch at the Bon Marché department store.

This, I thought, was the perfect candidate for a wine pairing with the book. In addition to its symbolic importance in Fadiman’s life story, Graves is in Bordeaux, his favorite wine region. Anne Fadiman attributes her father’s preference for Bordeaux over Burgundy, which he also loved, to this:

Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles. The antithesis of an apartment over a Brooklyn drugstore.

Her father’s angst over being the son of lower-middle-class immigrant Jews is a recurring theme in the book. One painful anecdote reveals how anti-Semitic discrimination at Columbia deprived him of his aspiration to be a professor in their English department. While he went on to achieve tremendous success outside of academia, Anne Fadiman writes that her father never got over that snub.

The choice of wine also adhered to my own taste: white Graves varietals are sauvignon blanc and sémillon, which I much prefer over the chardonnay of Burgundy. The die was cast, and I headed to my local wine store where I asked to be directed to the white Burgundy from Graves. The clerk, perhaps accustomed to such gaffes, flatly noted that Graves is in Bordeaux before explaining that they only had red Bordeaux in stock. Reeling with embarrassment—my WASPish self-consciousness as deeply ingrained as Clifton Fadiman’s own insecurities—I followed the clerk across the store to survey the mostly lavishly-priced reds of Bordeaux. Sensing my hesitation, he suggested I try the $30 bottle of Château Tour Peyronneau 2015 Saint-Émilion Grand Cru Merlot they were currently serving by the glass.

This is how I learned that I have unconsciously—perhaps a hangover from the wine snob’s opinions in Sideways—been shunning merlot at my expense. It was delicious, easy-drinking, ripe, fruity stuff. Perhaps too easy since I had not eaten lunch. While waiting to pay for a bottle to take home, I inspected some half bottles by the counter. In my wine-emboldened state, I mistook the two syllables of Bourgogne (the French for Burgundy) for Bordeaux and believed I had in fact found a bottle of white Bordeaux in the shop. At $105 it was not the cheap white Graves of Fadiman’s department store lunch, but Fadiman was all about French vintage wines and I was gripped by the 14%-ABV-induced urge to splash out.

But wait! I spotted ANOTHER half-bottle of white Bourdeaux-nay-Bourgogne, a relative steal at $38. I brought both to the counter, along with the merlot. The clerk, silent if he had in fact detected my latest blunder, rang me up, making me the proud, foolish owner of $143 worth of my least favorite white wine, chardonnay.

This seems like a good time to acknowledge that my enjoyment of wine outstrips my knowledge of it. With French wine I’m most comfortable choosing from other regions, including, in rough order of who’s paying from me to not me, riesling from Alsace, Sancerre (sauvignon blanc from the Loire), and Condrieu (viognier from the northern Rhône).

The daughter of Clifton Fadiman would have never mistaken Burgundy for Bordeaux. In a sixth-grade school report she explained that “Bordeaux is bottled in abruptly-shouldered bottles, while Burgundy bottles have more sloping shoulders,” adding parenthetically: “Duh. I’d known that since I was six.” In sixth grade she also knew the names of Premier Cru, and some Grand Cru, Burgundies; a slew of oenological terms; and that most of the Great Years were odd numbers, including ’29, ’45, ’49, and ’59.

Despite knowing her way around a cellar, Anne Fadiman serves her memoir in mostly short chapters, a friendly list of wines-by-the glass rather than an imposing carte des vins. There are charming anecdotes and trivia, from a letter Hemingway drunkenly wrote to her father—in response to reviews of Hemingway’s short story collection Winner Take Nothing—to the revelation that the glass Julia Child raised when she toasted “Bon appétit!” on TV was filled with nothing more than water tinted with Gravy Master.

Fadiman’s vignettes portray a childhood that was generally idyllic and her love for her father is evident, but she’s also able to assess him with relative clarity. When she can’t she allows others to do so, as when towards the end of the book—long after the reader has already deduced the same—she lets her older brother explain why neither of them particularly like wine: “Because we didn’t need to escape our origins.”

Although Clifton Fadiman seemed to carry the burden of impostor syndrome with him no matter how famous or wealthy he became, he was also willing to admit when he made a mistake. When he was at The New Yorker, his last column of each year reappraised the books he had reviewed unfairly, or missed, over the past twelve months. His taste in wine, which had been dominated by old Europe, also changed, becoming more expansive. In his late sixties he moved up the coast from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and developed an interest in California wines. By his mid-eighties, Greece, Chile, Australia, Corsica, and Yugoslavia had made forays into his wine cellar. Anne Fadiman writes that:

I knew he’d really loosened up the night he drank a German white with a large plate of spaghetti.

As for me, the bottle of Château Tour Peyronneau is now gone, most of it drunk with a bowl of lentil soup and a za’atar flat bread at a BYOB Lebanese restaurant. It may not have been a classic food and wine pairing, but it was in the spirit of Fadiman, who always drank his wine with food—sharing a bottle with his second wife and Anne Fadiman’s mother, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, with dinner every night. My two pricey half-bottles of chardonnay remain untouched as I mull over the possibilities for their disposal. I could give them away to a friend who loves chardonnay, but there would be stubbornness lurking in the gesture. Better that we share them; if Clifton “Kip” Fadiman can drink silvaner with spaghetti, there’s hope for my palate yet. It would be delicious to be wrong.