Jonathan Gold, master prose stylist

A few months ago I was casting about for something to read, scanning the latest edition of the New Yorker with my typical mix of suspicion and only-mild envy, when I first heard of Jonathan Gold. Gold, the article coyly said, was one of our best food critics; his Pulitzer Prize, the only one by a food-writer so far---take that, Messrs Bruno and Bourdain---long overdue, even a trifle anticlimactic. I need hardly tell you how underwhelmed I was by such praise, coming as it did from a writer whose tone lurched from the acclamatory to the bathetic, sometimes in a single sentence: "On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals which new populations have come to town […]" It was one of those mutually masturbatory interludes for which the New Yorker has become rightly known, where a hitherto unknown [writer, artist, journalist] is inexplicably championed by a hitherto somewhat-known [journalist, artist, writer], who in turn champions, in an article a few months down the line, the [journalist, artist, writer] responsible for his popularity, who is in turn championed…

But I thought I’d take a look anyway, and---to commit the first of many bathetic phrases myself---I was taken. The first article I read, the ferociously tactile appraisal of duck carnitas, began thrillingly, with a rhetorical question that went on into an asyndetic amalgam of the concrete and the marginally abstract. I would never taste duck carnitas, vegetarian that I am, but it was enough to have before me the evidence of Gold’s having eaten it; of his having understood its effect on his tastebuds as a kind of document, for all of humanity, of what it should feel like to eat duck carnitas (even the sturdiest of vegetarians will be turned to sin by Gold’s descriptions; Brahmins, beware). The article ended thus: “But if suffering good coffee, folksy music and the bourgeois presence of duck is the price one has to pay for access to Cacao's chiles rellenos, unbreaded roast poblanos stuffed with cheese and sweet corn or squash blossoms with cod, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” It was difficult to believe there was a whole fund of such writing, stretching back to the late nineties, when Gold was about my age, unaware of his genius, ambling about Los Angeles, looking for the next dish to subject to his excellent prose style. I dove into the archives.

As I suggest you do too. This blog-post, rarely for me, is one of those paeans, in which I swoon before a writer from whom I hope to learn and learn. The last such was Alan Hollinghurst, whose position in my writer’s hall-of-fame is next only to Henry James; Gold, in this admittedly schoolgirlish metric, clocks in at a sultry eighth place.