The Chicago Sun-Times, 04/25/2004

THIS FELLOW'S SWEET TOOTH IS WAY OUT OF CONTROL
Natalie Danford

Marcel Proust can keep his lousy madeleine as far as Steve Almond, the slyly funny, orally fixated author of the non-fiction narrative Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, is concerned. Almond, also author of the short story collection My Life in Heavy Metal, wields a taste memory that tops Proust's pathetic cookie: the Caravelle bar, which he describes as having "a malty flavor and what I want to call structural integrity; the caramel was that rarest variety, dark and lustrous and supple, with hints of fudge. More so, there was a sense of the piece yielding to the mouth. By which I mean, one had to work the teeth through the sturdy chocolate shell, which gave way with a distinct, moist snap, through the crisped rice (thus releasing a second, grainy bouquet), and only then into the soft caramel core. Oh that inimitable combination of textures! That symphony of flavors! And how they offered themselves to the heat and wetness of the mouth—the sensation of the crisped rice drenched in melted chocolate, chomped by the molars into the creamy swirl of caramel. Oh, woe and pity unto thee who have never tasted this bar! True woe! True pity!"

Widespread woe and pity, then, because the Caravelle exists no more and hasn't for years. Almond's gustatory deprivation is his readers' gain, however. As Almond himself cannily observes, "Art arises from loss," and the author has worked off of the absence of his beloved chocolate confection to create a book that is part memoir of childhood candy consumption, part paean to small candy makers, and tremendously engaging throughout.

It is Almond's almost stream-of-consciousness voice that lifts this material from a merely pragmatic investigation of chocolate, or of his own predilections, to a humorous yet thoughtful meditation. Dave Eggers used a similar style in his bestselling 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Hilary Liftin wrote about candy in last year's memoir Candy and Me. But unlike Eggers and Liftin, Almond concentrates on (read: obsesses about) candy rather than placing himself front and center.

In fact, unusually, Almond is not the hero of his own memoir. That title, instead, falls to the men and women who work for producers of regional treats such as Peanut Chews and Goo Goo Clusters. And Almond renders his own awe of these masters of the sugar universe in terms both believable and self-deprecating: "I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers. In the same way that I was aware that there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep over my own appointed lot in life."

Such small candy manufacturers are so embattled that one day Candyfreak may stand as a historical record of the end of a golden age, a bitter remembrance of sweet things past. One expert in the field predicts that ultimately only 150 of the 6,000 candy companies in existence in the period between World Wars I and II will survive. Like small businesses of all kinds, they are buckling under to their mammoth competition, in this case "the big three" (Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey), which control 90 percent of supermarket candy racks. Almond's visits to the Davids facing that three-armed Goliath begin at the Necco factory in Cambridge, Mass., where he discovers some interesting facts, including that a wafer assembly line produces 38,000 pounds, or 15,390,000 wafers, in one day, and that the puzzling purple wafers are clove-flavored.

The author goes on to convey handily the mesmerizing quality of the assembly line. At Haviland he falls into a trance as he observes marshmallow bunnies being doused in chocolate: "They rode the conveyor belt three astride, looking nonchalant in profile, as a curtain of milk chocolate washed down onto their white fleshy pelts and enveloped them and seeped off to reveal the dimensions of their bodies in a lustrous brown."

Almond's legwork shows not only in his accounts of factory visits, but also in the factoids he provides, with appropriate commentary, such as, "Most Americans had never even heard of chocolate in 1893, when Milton S. Hershey attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (The question that leaps to mind here, rather stubbornly, is why on earth they would want to go on living, but I will leave that aside for now.)"

Such research is the book's structural chocolate shell, meaning that it gives shape to the narrative, but the liquid center, the hidden treasure of Candyfreak, consists of Almond's recollections of his childhood relationship with chocolate. These could have devolved into the literary equivalent of an ain't-he-cute picture of a kid with his face smeared with pudding, but Almond remembers childhood unsentimentally as a jungle of competition and inchoate longing. "Was I the only child in America who regarded Baker's Chocolate as the cruelest food product ever invented?" he intones before recalling the delusion of biting into the bitter bar.

His poignant description of the rituals surrounding Halloween candy, which included spreading it out and then diving into it, "a la Scrooge McDuck and his gold ducats," offers an indelible portrait of the neurotic hedonist as a young man. Like the bickering couple in the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial, readers may be unable to determine whether Almond has mixed reminiscences into a report on the state of the candy business, or added details about the candy business to a memoir, but no matter: The results are irresistible.

Natalie Danford is co-editor of the Best New American Voices annual anthology.