The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

Though I can’t get enough of the stuff in real life, there’s something about cake in literary fiction that never fails to make me feel a little nauseous with dread (in real life, the nausea comes from having had too much cake). I think it started with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, when Mrs. Brown decides to make the perfect birthday cake for her husband. I can’t resist quoting this brilliant novel:

“She is going to produce a birthday cake — only a cake — but in her mind at this moment the cake is glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine; it is better, even, than the photographs of cakes in magazines. She imagines making, out of the humblest materials, a cake with all the balance and authority of an urn or a house. The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety.”

This fragile concoction of flour and sugar is of course a symbol for Mrs. Brown’s desire to be a good wife and mother, and the reader senses the cake will turn out no better than Mrs. Brown’s attempts at embracing domesticity. Of course, the poor cake cannot live [...]