LAND OF MILK AND HONEY, by C Pam ZhangA couple of summers ago, as I drove through Oregon amid a record heat wave across the Pacific Northwest, I pulled over at a trailhead to eat a plum. Wildfires were burning, temperatures hovered around 100 degrees and the pine forest in front of me had been rendered ghostly, the edges of everything lost and faintly browned by smoke. It was a shock, then, to bite into the fruit and taste its disruptive sweetness, how fresh and pure it was in spite of the surroundings. C Pam Zhang’s second novel, the follow-up to her Booker-longlisted western “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” dwells with keen intelligence and rich insight at this nexus of food, pleasure, privilege and catastrophe, offering a mouthful of nectar that tastes faintly of blood. Channeling something of the fatalistic nostalgia of Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” she narrates: “If I hesitated at my younger self’s declaration that everyone would taste my food, that cooking was an art neither frivolous nor selfish — well.

---

Persons: Pam Zhang, Pam Zhang’s, Booker, ”, Marguerite Duras’s “, who’d, Aida Locations: Oregon, Pacific Northwest, California