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Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer
Lynn Hoffman, a highly regarded food and drink writer from Philadelphia, tops his 1997 fiction debut of ‘The Bachelor’s Cat’ with a fully mature novel bang BANG: A Novel, a book so well conceived and stylishly written that it places Hoffman in the realm of top American writers.
And while many readers may know him form his books on food, beer, and wine (terrific tomes of culinary skill admixed with humor and wit), few will be prepared for the impact of this superb new work.
Paula Sherman is a waitperson in a stylish restaurant Odetta, a wannabe singer simple girl whose best friend Tom is killed as she watches by a foolish gunman with little apparent reason for the deed. On the scene a reporter quotes the distraught Paula’s comment ‘It wasn’t the gun, it’s that man’, a slogan picked up quickly and twisted by a senator who is backed by the UGA (United Gun Association) to campaign against gun control.
Paula’s life changes abruptly as she emerges into a woman with a mission: she manages to surface from an ordinary life as a vigilante who targets the cars bearing UGA decals, shattering windshields as her gesture against the wasted death of her friend Tom. In time Paula meets Daniel, a man she can actually love, and with his support she gains courage an influence that rapidly spreads across the country in an anti-gun movement.
One character who adds immensely to the story is constant Odetta gourmet diner Emanuel Cardoso (and his frequent dinner companion, the short of stature Lichtmann), who witnesses Paula’s nighttime derring-dos and who eventually is Paula’s elected source for political payoff. By introducing Cardoso, Huffman allows space for some wonderful writing about food and the culinary arts as well as some light comedy and compassion: pages from the observing Cardoso’s diary are sprinkled through the pages of the novel: they are a pleasure all to themselves!
The story is a very powerful anti-gun statement, but fine as that theme may be it has rarely been accompanied by the extraordinary skill of a writer as creative and gifted as Lynn Hoffman. Hoffman has a way with words that makes the reader pause in this propulsive narrative to simply bask in the pleasure of well-crafted phrases. “Our park bench lets us see past Rodin’s fame-slain Thinker, sucking his knuckles at the entrance to the Rodin Museum. In the distance, in the thin, late winter sunshine, we observe a swaying dark blob that widens and narrows without changing height. The blob becomes a group of six skaters, telephotically compressed. The widening is the centrifugal swaying as the saw their way up the street….”. Such is only a brief example of how Hoffman paints his scenery for the story that is so keenly and succinctly addressed.
bang BANG: A Novel is one of those little treasures of a book that rewards on every level and it most assuredly confirms the stature of an important American writer. Highly recommended for a very wide reading audience.
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