Theoretical Foot, The

by M.F.K. Fisher (Contributor)

NA

Genres: Fiction, Food, Book Club, Womens Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2016

About the author

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

For once, I found a book in the library so promptly that I remembered where the recommendation came from: this list of ‘gentler women’s fiction’. I thought something gentle might balance all the non-fiction I’ve been reading about climate change, the flaws of capitalism, Brexit, etc. Gentle doesn’t seem like an apposite term for this novel, though. It’s very emotionally claustrophobic, which does not make for an especially soft and relaxing read. It reminded me quite a bit of A Dark Stranger by Julian Gracq. In both books, a small group of nebulously upper class people are on holiday in a beautiful locale, with nothing to do except brood obsessively about their relationships with one another. ‘The Theoretical Foot’ dials up up the intensity further by including more sibling relationships and removing the neutral setting of a hotel. Instead, the novel is about a house party, taking place in a bucolic Swiss estate.

The descriptions of the house and surrounding countryside were the highlight of the book for me. As the afterword recounts, Fisher is describing a real place, which explains the convincing sensuousness of the details. I could evoke the whole place in my mind, and it seemed a wonderful spot for a holiday. On the other hand, the lack of holiday excursions and activities leaves only eating, drinking, and passing judgement (on one another and themselves). Thus the reader spends more time than is comfortable in the minds of each guest - but not the hostess. She is a thinly veiled portrait of Fisher herself, apparently. There is a lot of concern about unmarried sex, as the hostess is living with a man other than her husband and the first narrator Sue is backpacking around Europe with her boyfriend. Or rather, the concern seems excessive by today’s jaded standards, although at the time it would have seemed shocking in its frankness. I certainly appreciated the complexity of the female characters’ attitudes to men and sexuality.

Surprisingly, given that it is set in 1938, the looming world war appears almost entirely absent. Presumably because the characters are all extraordinarily self-involved and live in privilege. While I found this navel-gazing narrative emotionally insightful for the most part, it also became stifling. These people never seem to think about anything but themselves and each other! What about their other friends and family? What about current events? What about their careers, hobbies, and interests? Even though the locale is beautiful, a holiday spent with nothing to do except perpetually socialise with unfamiliar and over-familiar people does not sound restful to me. Not that I am someone who requires constant exercise and diversion on holiday, quite the apposite. Ideally I like a museum or two, some gentle walking, and a great deal of lounging around quietly without having to exhaustively catalogue my feelings about those around me. I almost felt that the beautiful setting of ‘The Theoretical Foot’ was under-appreciated - while the characters enjoyed and praised it, that didn’t distract them from their melodramatic internal soliloquies.

[Robin Meadows · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beautiful writing on a sentence level but crude, unskilled storytelling and pointless, ugly story.

[Kate Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the heart of La Prairie, Tim and Sara's exquisite house on Lake Geneva, there is a mirror which reflects the scenes of one late summer day in 1938 with heightened clarity and colour. It's an apt motif for Fisher's fiction - if you have loved both the sensuality and precision of her food writing this newly discovered novel will delight you. Unsurprisingly the descriptions of the enigmatic Sara's delicious meals and carefully selected wines are mouth-watering.

Though Fisher was American, she spent extended periods of time living in Europe, and this novel has a European sensibility - I kept thinking it would make a wonderful film or play. It demands your attention - Fisher head hops through multiple points of view, often in one scene, but she draws the characters with such a fine eye there is no confusion. Rhodes scholar Joe, swaggering through the day 'like a great heavy cat, a tom', and his 'tiny lewd and beautiful love', Sue, arrive at Sara's house to find no room at the inn. Sara's brother and sister, and Tim's poet sister with her companion Lucy are already staying. Lucy, as uptight as her girdles, is scandalised by the bohemian idyll.

Fisher captures a single day, a moment as full-blown and beautiful as the vases of flowers gathered from the fields around La Prairie by Tim's sister. The sense that this brief perfection will not last rumbles in the distance like storm clouds gathering over the lake. War is coming in Europe, and the chapters are also punctuated by surreal, almost hallucinatory accounts of an unnamed man in hospital undergoing an amputation - the 'theoretical foot' of the title. Global and private tragedy wait in the wings as the friends dance before the darkening mirror, and enjoy one last night, one last meal. Reading Vanderburgh's afterword takes your breath away when you realise how much of this story is based on Fisher's own beautiful and tragic life.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 3 out of 5]

What determines what is saved and what is lost? A French apartment is discovered undisturbed after seventy years with all its contents intact including a priceless painting. A roll of film turns up from the 1950s but the couple in it are untraceable.

Whilst reading Sister Age, a collection of short stories by Fisher, I discovered that her second husband Dillwyn Parrish died by suicide. After further digging I discovered that Fisher wrote an interesting novel inspired by their life together called The Theoretical Foot. Because it features sex between two unmarried couples it was set aside for 70 years.

I quickly ordered the book because I wanted to read about the bohemian life depicted on a marvellous estate called La Prairie inspired by the real life estate Le Paquis, that Parrish’s family owned before the second world war. As far as I can make it there are no photos in existence of Le Paquis. Despite lots of visitors, the estate only exists within the journals written by Fisher or as fiction in The Theoretical Foot.

In the novel it is 1938 and two guests, an unmarried couple Susan Harper and Joe Kelly are making their way towards La Prairie. Susan hopes to ask the advice of Sara, the matriarch who is living with Tim at his family’s wonderful estate. Should she continue to see Joe or go back home.

Already at the villa are Tim and Sara (forever preparing the meals) Tim’s sister Ann Garten Temple, a writer and her friend the awful, psychotic and completely self-obsessed Lucy, a painter. Also at the villa are Sara’s brother and sister, Honor and Daniel, both tall like the older Sara. Interspersed with these scenes are six epilogue/prologue pieces about a nameless man becoming sick and having to have his leg amputated. The reader can only guess who he is. The answer lies in the Afterword by Jan Vandenburgh.

This is a slow, drifting, dreamlike book with its characters caught in a moment in time, a way of life that is about to disappear forever. I loved the clothes, the food the beautiful descriptions but just would have loved a bit more plot. A bit more of the outside world threatening. I’ll leave you with one of Fisher’s exquisite descriptions.

“Sunlight flickered through the leaves of the twisted old fruit trees that bent over the tables at the end of the terrace as if benevolently. The sound of the voices was soft as the people sitting there talked vaguely, easily after their lunch. The little fountain murmured and chuckled. Below, upon the white lake a whiter paddleboat churned almost gaily towards Chillon.”

[Starre Vartan · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of an impressionist painting than a novel, more like eating a multiday meal than reading, left me craving a bowl of handmade pasta with fresh herbs and a glass of Tannat.

[Alix · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a surprise waiting for me on the "new fiction" shelf of the Morrison Library. I, like most people, had thought that "Not Now But Now" was MFK Fisher's only novel. I am a lifelong fan of her food writing, so naturally I grabbed this one. It's a very thinly disguised autobiographical work, but if you didn't know about her life it would read like a novel. I can't tell exactly when she wrote it (it was published in 2016), but it takes place in August 1938, and must have been written soon thereafter; however, it reads to me like a novel from a slightly earlier era. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway kept coming to my mind. The point of view shifts often (in fact, the MFK Fisher stand-in character is the only one whose mind we never read, making her the mystery at the center of the novel), and the narrative follows all the flickers of the characters' shifting thoughts and feelings. There is even a culminating dinner party scene where someone draws the blinds, a la Mrs Dalloway--and the action all takes place on one day. I am talking myself into believing Woolf was one of her inspirations. :-) Of course her real inspiration was her one true love, Dillwyn ("Tim") Parrish. I may have over-rated this a tiny bit because of my fondness for her and excitement at finding a new novel by her, because of course she's no Virginia Woolf, but I think she pulls it off pretty impressively.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

some books are best left as manuscripts 😬

[Carolynmora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have adored MFK Fisher's non-fiction for many years and was surprised to find that she had written this novel, which was posthumously discovered and published. The afterword explains how auto-biographical the story is and why it wasn't published during her lifetime. I kind of wish I had read the afterword first, so I understood it more while reading it. A bit strange and dream-like, the book is about an assorted group of Americans on summer holiday in Switzerland, as Europe is on the brink of World War II. Given the author, I thought there would be more detail about what they ate, but I suppose there is quite a lot. Just not as much as I would have liked. :-)

[Pascale · Rating 1 out of 5]

A complete bore. This book didn't see the light of print during the author's lifetime, and Fisher's reputation gains nothing by its release. There is no story, and the characters are such paltry egotists, one and all, that it's impossible to give a damn for any of them. All they do is get drunk and spy on each other out of sheer boredom. The brief italicized chapters chronicling Tim's leg's amputation seem totally unconnected to the narrative of the long house-party. Presumably Fisher intended some sort of poignant counterpoint effect but she didn't have the literary tools to pull it off.

[Paul Lima]

Boring characters in a boring situation with little discernable plot. I confess, I abandoned the book. Will the couple stay together or not. They want to. Wait, he wants to and she doesn't. Wait, they don't want to. Wait, she does and he doesn't. Wait, they will talk to someone about it and do what she suggests. Wait, they break up... Wait, they will discuss it again in the morning... And then the bok shifts to another character who seems totally miserable. Don't know what her problem is or what the couple will do. Don't care. Delete from Kobo.

[pianogal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much like the new Harper Lee book, this one should have been left in the darkness from whence it came. It was just a bunch of rather wealthy people together in Europe whining about their lives. Sigh. She didn't even write that much about food.

Sorry. You can skip this one.

[Trina]

Goodreads win. Will review once received.

[Kimberly]

Want to read after discovering in book page.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction F5351t 2016

[Janet · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book full of neurotic, narcissistic, and uninteresting characters.

[Donna Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked it better than many other reviewers. I found it helpful to read the afterward first. Help frame the story.

[R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as her culinary books.

[Kay Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absorbing, oddly.

[Estela Campbell-Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, well written book. I love the 1920-1930s era so a great find

[Laurie Campbell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't get into it. Not really a plot. Never finished it just took it back to the library :(

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the character vignettes and the loose flow of the story. I do want to know whose idea it was to leave copy editing errors on what felt like every page.

[Catherine Bateson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love M K Fisher's writing but this novel did not move me.

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't care how beautiful people think the prose is. This book is a day in the life of some very self-absorbed people, but nothing happens. Nothing.

[Sheryl Kirby · Rating 2 out of 5]

So when an unpublished book by your favourite writer ever is discovered and published, you’re kind of excited, right? When I finally got my hands on a copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s The Theoretical Foot, I was almost shaking with anticipation. And then…

There’s a reason why Fisher’s novel was never published in her lifetime, A few in fact. First was that she based all the characters on real people (it’s quite close to being autobiographical), and people featured in the book found it to be mean-spirited and harsh. Second was that, sadly, it’s just not very good.


The book is full of the gorgeous descriptive prose Fisher is known for, although she talks mostly about people and less so about food. But the premise — house guests and party-goers spending a day at a gorgeous home in Switzerland in 1939 the day before Hitler attacks Poland, and their often complicated relationships with each other — are too intense, too near-incestuous, and completely without context to make any kind of point.

It is only from knowing the story of Fisher’s personal life (the main characters are meant to be her and her lover Dillwyn Parrish — while they eventually married, both were married to others at the time), from knowing her other writing and the events that came after the time of the book, that the reader gets any grasp of the full meaning of the work.

The main story is interspersed with brief chapters about a man losing his foot to gangrene. In real life, weeks after the date of the story, Parrish lost his leg to gangrene caused by Buerger’s disease (a scary illness for which the cause is still unknown but which is almost always associated with nicotine use). Fisher is clearly painting the day of the dinner party as not only the last day before the war, which changed their lives forever, but as the last halcyon days of her relationship with Parrish — while they did later marry, he eventually committed suicide, and she struggled financially.

Additionally, Fisher’s characters, while well-developed, are just horrible, self-obsessed people, and the character of Lucy, based on the real-life house guest Mary, a friend of Parrish’s sister Anne, was terrible enough for Anne to ask Fisher not to publish the work, which she agreed to.

Had the work been published when Fisher was still alive, the editing process might have made her themes and plot much more clear, but The Theoretical Foot was a harsh disappointment for this M.F. F. Fisher fan.

[Iv y · Rating 4 out of 5]

totally fantastic, every character so perfect, and different from one another, their inner monologues! and tragic too, although this only really made sense after i read the afterword because i couldn’t find the date written/published anywhere and didn’t know which historical events they were referring to at some points. no matter. funny to read two books in a row about phantom limbs, how horrific. nan and honor particularly i felt close to, to think the real nan was so horrified to read it. dan feels like a patricia highsmith character, all those sooks and mood swings and leaping about. 4.5 and here all are my favourite lines:

“You’re my own particular and peculiar little pervert.”

“…my tiny lewd and beautiful love.”

“…she was suddenly filled with creamy contentment, like a kitten’s.”

Where else in the world were there are many enormous people as she had seen today?

Well, if he doesn’t kill himself first he’ll make as fine a man as his sister is a woman.

…if a woman with as strong a will as hers could find herself growing even slightly lax about her reading, what might a weaker person risk and about more important things?

She was conscious of the bones moving within their warm firm envelope…

She, in her own room, would be saying many things in every room in the house, unsuspected, silently, with amusement, with cold intelligence, with love.

Oh, hurry, hurry, she prayed, her face smiling vaguely. Something is getting ready. Something is forming, slowly, surely, through all this strange summer. I am learning. But what is it

Does he long to plump me up, to make me big and strong enough to fight life’s battles?

We resent her importance to us; we’d rather spend all that admiration and consciousness on other people and she’s there taking it.

God am I big. I am beautiful but I am so enormous, so tall. Maybe it’s glandular, maybe this is why I’m so unhappy.

She felt as clean, as sterile, as boring as a dairy lunch.

She looked with true disgust at her untidy bed, then left the room.

She didn’t really seem like a woman at all, more a type of delicious joke.

Several pages of Les Faux-Monnayeurs meant nothing to her.

She was delicate and mysterious, like a celestial monkey.

What was he, a damned rubber stamp?

The wine was rich and ripe and slid down their various throats in different ways.

yes, yes….

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"When Robert Lescher died in 2012 an unpublished manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher’s was discovered neatly packed in the one of the literary agent’s signature red boxes. Inspired by Fisher’s affair with Dillwyn Parrish -- who was to become her second husband -- The Theoretical Foot is the master stylist’s first novel. In it she describes the life she all-too-briefly had with the man she’d ever after describe as the one great love of her life.

It tells of a late-summer idyll at the Swiss farmhouse of Tim and Sara, where guests have gathered at ease on the terrace next to the burbling fountain in which baby lettuces are being washed, there to enjoy the food and wine served them by this stylish American couple.

But all around these seemingly fortunate people, the forces of darkness are The year is 1939; World War Two approaches. And the paradise Tim and Sara have made is being besieged from within as Tim -- closely based on Parrish -- is about to suffer the first of the circulatory attacks that will cause him to lose his leg to amputation."

This book wasn't easy to get into. The characters weren't easy to understand or emphasize with particularly, although we've all known most of them in our own lives. There didn't seem to be an ending, a wrapping up ... the book just sort of drifted away,. which contributed to my sense of unattachment ot the book, the characters, and the story.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. My. Word.

What a way to break a self-imposed stay of reading. I had no idea M.K.Fisher had written novels in addition to her wonderfully wry and sardonic approach to recipe books - I actually picked this up via one of the clearance bins in Waterstones, on a restless evening visit after work intended to clear my head and settle my nerves.

I loved this book, and all the more when reading the additional note at the end from Jane Vandenburgh. Sara and Tim. Tim and Sara. Sue - Honor - Nan - even Joe and Daniel and Lucy - oh to see that endless whirling day from every different angle but the couple they orbit - Sara and Tim, Tim and Sara, the sun and star and I felt for both of them from the first, felt Sara's cry at the end and then that terrible, terrible realisation set against the not-quite-epigraph -

I loved this book. No idea who to rec it to yet.

Edited to say: I think I benefited from coming to this cold, with so little awareness of the year, the dream-like lyric sequence and the harrowing autobiographical elements; knowing them now deepens the bittersweet realisation I had right at the end, that wrenched a denial out of me at the time, sat alone in my apartment with the windows open and the light fading out of the day.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quietly thoughtful, atmospheric read. This novel is a cacophony of different voices with a cast of half a dozen tortured souls, who all are as mysterious and remote from one another as islands. None can seem to figure themselves, much less each other, out. This inability to understand themselves— especially their own needs & desires— is at the root of each's struggle to define themselves against one other.
While I enjoyed Fisher's exploration of complex familial relationships & differing perspectives, this novel is made far more interesting when considered alongside its historical context. World War 2 was just about to begin, and Fisher's lover was just about to be diagnosed with a rapidly advancing terminal disease that caused him to lose his leg in a matter of weeks.
The novel abruptly ends at the very precipice of both of these events, and the agony & pain described intermittently throughout the novel provides a stark contrast to the idyllic setting of La Prairie... Foreshadowing huge changes for each character that is blissfully passing their time in luxurious ignorance at the summer home.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strange book but very beautifully written. A disparate group of people brought together by love and jealousy, spend twenty four hours in each others company at a house party in Switzerland. Each section is told from the mindset of one of the guests and focuses on the interplay of their conflicting emotions. Interspersed with this is an unrelated series of scenes of a man in a hospital bed about to have his leg amputated. It is, as you know if you have read M F K Fisher's non fiction or the short essay at the back of the book, a largely autobiographical piece toggling in time between two key periods in Fisher's life. Fascinating.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable novel that clearly depicts an era through it's characters interactions and beliefs.

The intro to each chapter slowly becomes less jarring as the novel progresses and clarity comes. The writing style was brilliant for me - it felt like you were experiencing it all, another person in the room observing.

For those who like a very strong and complicated plot this won't be for you. It's more focused on the character building and reflecting the societal values of the era.