The Weekly Dig (Boston), 04/27/2004

Nobody Does Self-Loathing Like the Jews

by Steve Almond

There is no doubt that Steve Almond's literary handlers hope to market his new book, Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, as a "daring amalgam of comic memoir, social history, and reportage." Something like that.

Where I come from, we have a simpler name for books like this.

We call them crap.

Actually, Candyfreak is worse than crap. It's the kind of deeply cynical effort that seeks to cash in on pop culture nostalgia while also clinging to the mantle of high art. One might have expected such a thing from Almond, who is as transparently calculating as they come. He's the sort of guy who wants to be the class clown and get an A-plus on his final paper. In short, a tool. Almond is best known as the author of My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove Press, 2002) a short story collection that featured "poetic" accounts of female ejaculation, anal sex, and other such filth. Introspective misogyny, you might say.

Candyfreak begins with an autobiographical section that seeks to establish Almond's confectionary bona fides. He labors to document his obsession with candy, how much of the stuff he eats, what he likes and (of course) what he doesn't. Here, for instance, is his take on Twizzlers:

Twizzlers are basically an imitation of red licorice, which, itself, has no cognate in the natural world...Its flavor is so completely artificial that I've often wondered if the production staff might not endeavor to make it just a little more artificial tasting, thus crossing over an invisible flavor threshold, and allowing the product to start tasting less artificial. This is to say nothing of the Twizzler texture, which falls somewhere between chitin and rain poncho.

Almond is trying to be funny here...I guess. But the discerning reader will be left with a rather obvious question: who died and named this nimrod King of Candyland?

Not content to batter us with his "witty" opinions, Almond—one half-suspects he changed his name as a publicity stunt—also finds time to indulge in his particular brand of phallic vulgarity.

The Marathon Bar stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn't resist the gimmick. And then, as if we weren't bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence: If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick.

Later in the book, you'll be heartened to discovered, Almond treats us to a detailed description of his cancer scare—testicular cancer. Charming. Just what we're looking for in a light beach read.

Almond doesn't limit himself to navel-gazing, though. No, he has a larger agenda, namely to document the history of candy bars in America, and to detail his visits to half a dozen regional candy companies.

And I do mean detail. Almond takes us through the factories where they make such bizarre creations as the Twin Bing, the Idaho Spud, the Valomilk, the Big Hunk, and the Goo Goo Cluster. This is entertaining for about 20 pages. The other 80 are simply numbing. At one point, Almond—apparently bored silly himself—resorts to haiku.

Sadly, the book isn't content to be a high-calorie travelogue, either. Oh no. Almond also has several lessons to impart. He wants us to know just how evil late-model capitalism is. In his view, the true Axis of Evil is not represented by war, poverty, or despotism, but by the Big Three candy companies (Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé), who have pushed the little guys off the retail shelves and out of business.

As moralizing goes, it's pretty ridiculous stuff. White liberal guilt is to be expected from guys like Almond. But to attack companies for the unpardonable sin of being successful makes about as much sense, in this day and age, as stumping for Lenin. The most pathetic passages of Candyfreak are those that attempt to contrive a link between Almond's sweet-tooth and his broken heart. It's during these ad hoc homilies that the violin swells grow deafening:

I had always imagined that some splendid woman would come along and cure me. Or that my work as a writer, my passionate, empathic accomplishments, would overwrite the bad files of my childhood. And what I realized, as I drove through that light California rain, was that the burden of these great hopes was often too much for me to bear. I feared I would die before I got better. In certain ways, I wanted to die. And, in certain ways, I felt dead already.

I had decided to write about candy because I assumed it would be fun and frivolous and distracting. It would allow me to reconnect to the single, untarnished pleasure of my childhood. But, of course, there are no untarnished pleasures. That is only something the ad men of our time would like us to believe. Most of our escape routes are also powerful reminders; and whatever our conscious motives might be, in our secret hearts we wish to be led back into our grief.

Oy vey.

I will spare the gentle reader any more of this dime-store Freudery. But trust me, it gets worse. Having already strong-armed the reader mercilessly about his preferred confections and pinko politics, he now assaults us with his ostentatious sensitivity. Almond is plainly attempting to channel writers such as Calvin Trillin and Eric Schlosser. But he lacks the eloquence or moral authority of these pros. So instead he settles for dick gags and moral grandstanding. He wants us to laugh and to cry, but his whole approach stinks of desperation. This is a sloppy, indulgent book by a writer who should know better.

I apologize for writing it.