The Theoretical Foot

February 15, 2016
The legendary and incantatory powers of description that earned Fisher (The Gastronomical Me) her fame as one of the 20th century's best prose writers are fully at work in this intricate novel, the discovery of which is almost as romantic a story as the couple at its center (the book was never published in her lifetime and was found in her late agent's effects in 2012). In late August 1938, an unmarried American couple, Tim Garton and Sara Porter, welcome to their lovely Swiss estate of La Prairie a number of expatriates. Their troubles, heartbreaks, worries, and triumphs coalesce around a party that, like the gathering war in the background, acquires undercurrents of tragedy. While points of view alternate among Sara's brother, Dan, and sister, Honor; Tim's literary sister, Nan, and her companion, Lucy; and the young lovers Joe and Susanâall of whom are trying to escape some spell of loveâthe contrapuntal vignettes of an anonymous man suffering agonies from an amputated leg make the wistful longings of the other characters seem dreamy by comparison. Tim and Sara are the steady, sphinx-like, yet essential pair, loosely based on Fisher and the "one true love" of her own life, who hold the others in orbit about them. Readers longing for the clever banter of Hemingway's characters or the indolent gloss of a Fitzgerald story will adore the book's modernist style, in which the action focuses on each passing thought, each turn of emotion, each detail of drink or cigarette with an extraordinary attention that makes the ordinary seem simultaneously bewildering, mysterious, and absurd. This is a worthy addition to the Fisher canon.

December 15, 2015
From the great 20th-century food and travel writer, a lyrical roman a clef set among Americans in 1930s Switzerland. In 1938, Fisher was living with her soon-to-be second husband, Dillwyn "Tim" Parrish, in a farmhouse outside a Swiss village. Soon after this autobiographical story is set, Parrish developed a circulatory disease and had to have his leg amputated. The agony of his phantom limb--the "theoretical foot" of the title--eventually drove him to suicide, and Fisher's novel lay unpublished in her agent's files for decades. In it, the Fisher character, Sara Porter, is living out of wedlock with the Parrish-like Tim Garton on an estate overlooking a Swiss lake. Late in the summer, Tim's and Sara's siblings and several friends descend on the couple for a house party. Brief italicized passages from Tim's point of view after he loses his leg contrast darkly with the sensuous and mostly plotless idyll. The book's key note is impossible love: siblings longing for siblings with almost incestuous intensity, a young man infatuated with an older woman, a widow in love with her female best friend, couples scandalously unmarried or married to other people. All this longing infuses the action--or rather, inaction--with a poignancy familiar to readers of Fisher's travel and food writing. The characters pick flowers, arrange them, nap, dress, watch each other in mirrors, and, of course, eat and drink: "They ate little roasted cold pigeons and dug into a magnificent aspic all atremble with carrots and radishes and slices of cucumbers cut like stars and moons....The wine was rich and ripe and slid warmly down their various throats in different ways." A period piece and an interesting novelty, Fisher's novel has exquisite moments, but it's easy to see why she didn't consider herself a novelist.

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March 1, 2016

Reimagining Mary Frances Kennedy (M.F.K.) Fisher's relationship with Tim Parrish, whom Fisher eventually married, Warlick (Seek the Living) chronicles the full arc of their romance, beginning with what happened before the marriage: the arrangements. The first takes place in Los Angeles and involves a Hollywood starlet and a potential studio scandal, because in the late 1930s actresses did not get divorced. Mary Frances and her husband, Al Fisher, move in with Tim's wife, Gigi, while Tim secretly files for divorce back east. The second arrangement takes place in Switzerland, where Tim, Mary Frances, and Al make an awkward threesome. Strangely, for a story of passion, much of the writing is terse and dispassionate except when the subject is food; Warlick is better at showing us Fisher as food writer than as lover. There are choppy shifts in perspective among the three main characters, and the narrative is not improved by the random flash-forwards to the present.

In her novel The Theoretical Foot, Fisher writes what she knows. A scene in Warlick's work depicts an elderly Fisher reflecting, while sorting through her notebooks, that ."..she has written about Tim for years now. Hasn't she always written about Tim?" Well, she certainly does here. The story is autobiographical; while the events that occur may be fictional, they draw heavily from Fisher's own life. Tim is still Tim, but everyone else gets a pseudonym, including the barely disguised members of both of their families. The two have not yet married and are living in sin in 1930s Switzerland. The Nazis are expanding throughout Europe but are mostly background noise for the fashionable set staying at La Prairie house. The work reads as a series of interrelated character studies. Sara, Fisher's stand-in, spends most of her time in the kitchen, and Tim in the wine cellar, but the two serve as the nexus for their houseguests. In a highly compressed period of time, Tim and Sara's friends meet, greet, fall in love, fall out of love, grow up, and make life-changing decisions. And they do it with energy, passion, and misguided desire. As with Warlick's novel, this title includes awkward interjections from the future; a patient (Tim) is recovering from an amputation and plagued by a phantom limb, the eponymous theoretical foot. Fortunately, it doesn't distract from the larger story. VERDICT The Arrangement is more successful with the history of Fisher and Parrish's relationship than with capturing emotion, while The Theoretical Foot overall presents an engaging read, recommended for fans of Fisher, literary fiction, and historical travel fiction. [See Prepub Alert 8/31/15 for Warlick's The Arrangement.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

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