Topical Guide 405
Mark Dorset
Epigraphs
To the five that Kraft has provided, I might suggest adding this one:
“Show me an epigraph and I’ll show you a novel which has too good an idea of what it’s about.”
The Professor in Stanley Elkin’s, “The Graduate Seminar”
Reviews and Blurbs
Here is the flap copy from the most recent edition:
“At first, this dark comic novel seems like no more than a deft satire of chic big-city restaurants, snooty places with names like Dolce far Niente and Café Zurich, where the leather-bound wine list resembles a photo album of the sort usually embossed with the word ‘Our Wedding.’ Each chapter spotlights such an eatery, and each closes with a restaurant review by the pompous B. W. Beath. Just as Beath is only a pen name, masking the identity of one Matthew Barber, the true subject of the book—a society gone mad with self-absorption—isn’t on the menu. ...
“Like Matthew’s teeth, the novel gets darker as it goes along. From the outset, he is plainly a mite screwy; he has a whole wall of his trendy apartment demolished to locate an odor that only he can smell. By the end, having all but lost his soul to the Syparitic B. W., he is clearly going mad. Matthew’s journey from soup to nuts, though disquieting, is salutary, because Eric Kraft has a moral vision. His target is those who take nothing seriously but themselves, and his artful, bitter portrait of a man without compassion makes the best possible argument for that quality.”
Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek
“Matthew Barber is having his midlife crisis in comfort, sulking over goat cheese pizza at the trendy Alley View Grill, seducing a Lolita among the chilled salad forks at super-posh Café Zurich, watching his life, and his ex-wife, pass before his eyes while downing a surprising bouillabaisse stir-fry at the chaotic bistro Two-Two-Two. For Matthew is the restaurant critic for the impossibly arch Boston Biweekly, and no matter how deflating his love life, how drab his image in the mirror, the show must go on. But as Matthew’s behavior becomes increasingly odd, and his reviews increasingly Proustian, we begin to catch on that he may be suffering from worse than the middle-age blues. Eric Kraft is a satirist with style and sting. By looking askance at the downside of modern maturity, he sees it with more truth and clarity than the maudlin army of novelists who meet it grimly head on.”
Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
Here is the back cover of the most recent edition:
Here is the copyright page of the most recent edition:
Reservations Recommended is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, events, and organizations portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally and are not to be construed as real.
Copyright © 1990 by Eric Kraft
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
E-mail babbingtonpress@erickraft.com.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Beldock, Levine & Hoffman: an excerpt from lyrics to “Once in a Lifetime” by David Byrne and Brian Eno. © 1980, Index Music Inc./Blue Disque Music, Inc./E. G. Music, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, attorneys for Index Music Inc.
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.: an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Copyright © 1953 by Coward-McCann, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.
Thanks to Alex and Rita Shaknovich for the snatches of Russian in Superior Indian Cookery.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (detail, 1881)
Peter Leroy’s title page image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyr (detail, 1873)
Design and all other illustrations by Eric Kraft
www.erickraft.com
First published in the United States by Crown Publishers Inc.
First Babbington Press edition: March 2009
This edition: May 2018
Publishing History
1990 Crown published Reservations Recommended in hardcover.
1991 Scepter published Reservations Recommended in paperback in Great Britain.
1991 Eddiciones Destino published Reservations Recommended in paperback in Spain as Mesas Reservadas.
1995 Picador USA published Reservations Recommended in paperback.
1995 Voyager published The Complete Peter Leroy (so far), Kraft’s hyperfiction linking Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, and Where Do You Stop? through annotations written by Mark Dorset, who is a character in the work.
I’m writing this on December 31, 2022. It has been a difficult year. Here’s a shot of joy.
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