Childhood is a little like death: You can only write about it when you’re not in it, which means your description is basically an educated guess.
Within that limitation, however, Aimee Bender creates a lilting, economical and finally tragic portrait of what it means to be a child in her exquisite new novel,
“The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”
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(Doubleday). Children — as they are fond of reminding their parents — don’t ask to be born and don’t get to pick their families. They arrive naked and powerless, whereupon they have to make the best of things.
Rose Edelstein, the sensitive little girl at the center of Bender’s story, has a problem: When she eats, she can taste the mood of the person who made the food. “None of it was a bad taste,” she muses about her mother’s cake, “but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and the chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness.” In each bite, Rose discerns “absence, hunger, spiraling hollows.”
This may sound overly cute, but Bender is not trying for cuteness. Her novel is about more than the flavor of lemon cake; it’s about the flavor of loss. Rose’s brother Joseph gradually drifts away from the family. Rose’s mother hides a secret — from all but Rose. And Rose tries to hold everything together the only way a child knows how: by the concentrated force of quiet yearning.
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