True Confections

"True Confections is probably the most fun book on my list, and not only because it’s about candy – which is a huge draw for me as I’ve secretly always wanted to open a candy store. The main character is Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, who has married into a very prosperous but very fractious candy-making family in New Haven, Connecticut. She becomes the most passionate member of the business, becoming very close to her father-in-law, the patriarch, and learns all about the business. And she becomes closer and closer to it as her marriage falls apart because she has married a man who is not what he seemed. She has a rotten relationship with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, too – she’s a classic outsider. “The way she talks about chocolate and about boiling and tempering candy, those are the tones of an artist – chocolate is her medium” The most striking thing about the narrative is that, like Gertie Nevels, Alice Ziplinsky would never fancy herself an artist; she imagines herself as a business woman. Yet the way she talks about chocolate and the way she talks about boiling and tempering the candy, and how you know when you’ve got a really good bar of chocolate – you smell it first, and it smells kind of whole and sweet, and then you break it and listen for a healthy, neat little snap that denotes high quality chocolate with just the right balance of cocoa and fat – those are the tones of an artist. She’s talking about something she loves to make; chocolate is her medium as an artist, and that, on a personal level – maybe because I have such a fondness for candy – sounds kind of like music. It evokes sensory memory, it’s a feeling that you can’t quite put into words but it has the ability to pull you back to a certain place and time where you felt pleasure and a sense of wholeness that is very hard to find in life. The passages where she raves about the Twix ‘Java’ bar – a coffee flavoured bar that was only on the market for a short time and, man, I really loved it – are really beautiful. The real heart of the story – because the story of the marriage and of the family are kind of on the surface – is in Alice’s desire to make a wonderful piece of candy, a ‘true confection.’ That’s a really meaningful part of the story which culminates in her development of a candy called the ‘Little Susie’ that, among other things, contains white chocolate and flecks of deep, earthy vanilla bean. She is a very unreliable narrator, in many ways – and the effect is kind of fun but also kind of spooky. The deeper you go into the story you’re not quite sure whether or not Alice is telling you the entire truth as to how she eventually claimed control over the Ziplinsky family business. There is something unsavoury about the whole thing. A lot of the story is about interpretation – who has the right to interpret. There’s an interesting subplot in that respect: there’s a great doubt as to whether the patriarch of the family business had, in fact, stolen the original recipe for the ‘family candy’ on which the whole business is based. So the theme echoes throughout the book, and it underlies this ‘pure’ intention that drives Alice – her desire to make something that is entirely hers. In a way, she would like to own at least one part of the story for herself and for that story not to be something that requires manipulation. That’s something that every artist feels – they want to make something that’s wholly theirs."