Whether Tom Brown's Schooldays or the Harry Potter series, I'm a sucker for books in which a neophyte goes to school for the first time, endures its rigors and harsh realities, and emerges a better person after learning some hard-earned truths about himself and the limits of endurance. Ultimately the success of the story depends on the hero's transformation by graduation. While Jonathan Dixon's memoir of his education at the Culinary Institute of America follows the skeleton of the old schoolboy tale archetype, his overall character fails to improve, much less impress.

It's difficult to have such a sad sack as the focal point of a memoir. Dixon is a self-admitted slacker who wasted away his twenties and gambled his and his girlfriend's well-beings and limited resources in order to achieve a career change in his late thirties. (Throughout the book, he's morbidly sensitive about his age, to the point that his readers are embarrassed for his continual apologies for having lived longer than Methuselah. Dude, you're in your thirties. Not your seventies. Even if you were? Get the hell over it.) He's mopey, he's glum, he's continually worried and—let's be frank—obviously not the best student. And at book's end, sad to say, any confidence or mastery he may have achieved as a result of matriculating are squandered when he faces the future with the same aimless apathy as he's spent the rest of his allegedly advanced years.

It's a pity, because a great deal of his experiences at the CIA are interesting to outsiders: the rigid curriculum, the tyrannical and eccentric instructors, the obstacles to be overcome and the rigorous hoops to be jumped. The CIA has such a methodical and well-thought-out course structure, however, that it seems pretty obvious that any of the insights of which Dixon writes aren't his, but the school's—the exact realizations the institute wants its students to make at exact points in their training. Nor does it help that many of Dixon's class descriptions sound as if he's summarized his saved syllabi. The other students in the memoir are not much more than cyphers or personality tics who vanish quickly, like anything expendable. The instructors are a bit more fleshed out, but for most Dixon has precious little affection, and imparts a sense that he's settling some personal scores and grinding a few paring knives (if not axes) by giving himself the last word.

The book cured me of any vague wonderings I may have had of wishing for an alternative life path that might have involved the CIA, certainly. I'm just fortunate that, unlike Dixon, I never applied on whim and attended solely for the purpose of being able to host and cook for slightly snobbier dinner parties.