★★★☆☆ The Golden Spoon, by Jessa Maxwell
A suprisingly engaging story about perfectly spherical characters
The Golden Spoon
Jessa Maxwell
A suprisingly engaging story about perfectly spherical characters
Let's get one thing out of the way right at the start. The Golden Spoon is not a mystery novel. That is, it is not what one thinks of when the words "mystery novel" are said -- it is not a book in which the central plot is the investigation of a mystery (typically a murder committed by an unknown actor) of which everyone is aware. The publisher's blurb claims that "The Golden Spoon will keep you guessing until the very last page." That is utter nonsense.
Someone does get killed in The Golden Spoon. However, that event occurs only when you have read 80% of the book. The book begins with a prolog in which a body is discovered, but we then go back two weeks in time. It takes 80% of the book to get to the thing that happened in the prolog. Although some details are only revealed near the end of the book, it very rapidly becomes clear who is responsible for the killing. This is partly because of the way the story is told.
There are eight main characters in The Golden Spoon, the two judges of the baking competition, Betsy Martin and Archie Morris, and the six competitors. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one character. For the duration of the chapter we are in the point-of-view character's head and know what he or she is thinking. Thus, immediately after the discovery of the body, we have a chapter from the point of view of one of the competitors, in which he looks at his fellow competitors and wonders which one could be a murderer. This immediately tells the reader that the point-of-view character himself is not the killer. In this way most possible suspects are rapidly eliminated. Thus, the claim of the publisher's blurb, "when a body is discovered, everyone is a suspect," is quite, quite false, at least for the reader.
OK, The Golden Spoon is not a mystery. But that is not really the important question, is it? Is The Golden Spoon a good story, well told? The answer, with one serious exception described below, is "Yes." It started slow, but once it got going I found myself interested in the plot, eager to find out what would happened next.
The exception -- the thing I didn't much like about the book, is the characters. As an example, consider contestant Gerald. Gerald is a mathematician. Actually, Gerald is NOT a mathematician -- he is what someone who doesn't know any mathematicians thinks mathematicians are like. Nonmathematician's-idea-of-a-mathematician is the height and breadth of Gerald's character. He is the Platonic ideal of nonmathematician's-idea-of-a-mathematician. There's a joke that is often told about physicists
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."
This alleged joke mocks physicists' tendency to simplify problems to an absurdly implausible degree. That's how I felt about each of the characters of The Golden Spoon. Each character's personality could be reduced with no loss of fidelity to a single sentence description. They are perfectly spherical personalities -- neither believable nor interesting.
Despite this, I was surprised as the story went on to find that it was engaging me. I didn't care much about any of the characters, but I did care about the story, about how these spherical characters bounced off each other to produce events, and curious to know what was going to happen next and in the end.
Thanks to NetGalley and to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader's copy. This review expresses my honest opinions.