Topical Guide 544
Mark Dorset
Characters and Characterization
Amanda Heller, “Reservations Recommended,” The Boston Globe:
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 Cafe 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.
R. D. Pohl, “Reservations Recommended,” The Buffalo News:
Kraft’s protagonist here is Matthew Barber, in his mid-40s, a vice president for new product development (sometimes referred to as the vice president for Sensible Toys) at a major New England toy manufacturer. Recently divorced after 14 years of marriage, he now lives in a condominium penthouse and moonlights as B. W. Beath, a celebrated pseudonymous restaurant reviewer for Boston Biweekly magazine.
Barber “suffers from the least noticed but most widespread of modern emotional afflictions of men his age—an adequacy complex.” He is “not unattractive, not unintelligent, not unsuccessful, not unhealthy, not even . . . terribly unhappy. He thinks of himself as adequate, but only adequate, stuck at the adequacy level, and sometimes the bitter taste of his adequacy rises in his throat like heartburn.”
His alter ego Beath (“whose tastes are so refined that he can find the shortcoming in any experience”), on the other hand, is a master of Boston Biweekly’s mixture of “backhanded praise and acerbic wit,” written with an attitude of superiority that is intended as an antidote to the “adequacy complexes” of its middlebrow readers.
[…] Kraft juxtaposes conventional novelistic accounts of Matthew Barber’s dinner dates (and his postprandial psycho-erotic adventures as well) with B. W. Beath’s dyspeptic published “reviews” of “dining experiences.” […]
While Barber’s attitude towards the many paradoxes and indignities of contemporary urban life (i.e., elevators that refuse to work properly, mysterious pungent odors emanating from penthouse walls, and even the blight of poverty, crime and homelessness that obscures the affluent sheen of the postmodern American city) is one of benign desperation, B. W. Beath is about as much of an urban guerrilla as a restaurant reviewer can be.
See also:
Characters and Characterization TG 538, TG 540
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