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'The Cookbook Collector' is a satisfying serving

BY JEFFREY ANN GOUDIE

BY JEFFREY ANN GOUDIE

McClatchy Newspapers

"THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR"

By Allegra Goodman

Dial Press

394 pages, $26

Allegra Goodman's enchanting and sensuous new novel operates in pairs and opposites. Two sisters, one of them with two suitors. Two worlds, separate, even as they coalesce.

In "The Cookbook Collector," Goodman has written a romance that dissects ambition with a jeweler's precision and a culinary novel with a collection of rare cookbooks at its core. She also has produced a novel of ideas peopled by full-blooded characters. This taxonomy of dot-com ambition is a narrative about the turning of the wheel of fortune, the one the ancients and medievals believed in, not the one co-opted by television.

Set at the turn of the millennium, the sisters, transplants from New England, live in the San Francisco Bay area but in worlds separated by personality, values and style. Jess, 23, a graduate student in philosophy, distributes leaflets for an organization called Save the Trees. At the same time, she works in a rare book store, Yorick's, full of books made of, yup, dead trees.

Emily, her older sister by five years, is, at the tender age of 28, the CEO of a flourishing data storage startup she has named Veritech. She is involved with Jonathan, head of a data security startup called ISIS on the East Coast. Jess mistrusts her sister's boyfriend.

Jess and Emily both set off on a paper chase. Emily's company goes public, and all its employees become instantly rich, at least on paper. Jess is in pursuit of a different kind of valuable paper, a vintage cookbook collection. The collection's owner has approached George Friedman, the owner of Yorick's, who enlists Jess' help.

With her natural trust in other people, Jess wins over Sandra, the skittish owner of the 873 cookbooks. Hidden in the kitchen cabinets of Sandra's late uncle, a lichenologist, the cookbooks span the earliest palm-size cooking guides to later disquisitions on running a household. But they are all stuffed with notes by the never-married, reclusive Tom McClintock.

With many winks and literary references, "The Cookbook Collector" is a work of literary art with dollops of scholarship. Like "Intuition," Goodman's adult novel prior to this one, "The Cookbook Collector" explores the difference between opportunity and opportunism. But this book is better: more mature, more generous, more expansive and complicated.