Joanne Harris's book Five Quarters of the Orange is not new. It was published in 2002 and I have seen it in airport bookstores on and off since then. In fact, I just bought it again and read it again. (Why? Middle age.) The author of Chocolat as well as several books about French food (I think cookbooks but am not sure), Harris's novel both shows food as part of social (or at least family) cohesion and as deployable in viciously divisive ways. (Perhaps the power of food as communal to construct both cohesion and division, a la Nancy Jay's book, Throughout Your Generations Forever.) The plot turns centrally on a collage-like text that the narrator inherits from her mother -- recipes interlaced with memoir-like interpellations. Despite its title, another reader (or at another time, this one) might see the book as about fishing (and pike), but the titular oranges are indeed central -- their smell, their texture, their availability, their symbolic weight. The book is about the power of the olfactory in relation to food -- we all know the realtor's advice to bake cookies when selling your house, and some with epilepsy or migraines fear the olfactory aura that precedes seizures or headaches. It is this latter link -- between olfactory auras and migraines -- that Harris uses to interesting effect in this novel, raising issues of ethics and parent/child interaction, history and personal memory. In the many years of my life before I ever had a migraine, I might have identified most with the narrator -- but the horror of migraines which on occasion have even led me to emergency rooms, makes me actually angry with some of the narrator's actions. (For links related to migraines and olfactory auras, click here or here. The latter will tell you olfactory auras are less common with migraines than with epilepsy. It turns out, by the way, that there are loads of migraine blogs! To find these, click here.) In any case, here, in Harris's novel, the traumas of families intersect with the traumas of history (in the form of Vichy France), and the redemptive power of truth-telling is darkly hopeful. Scattered amongst the angst and ethics are recipes and descriptions of wasp-laden fruits, offered quietly and sometimes as crankily as love. And yes, the questionable edible is the orange -- though it is not the oranges, but their uses that are questionable.
That smell and memory go together in this novel is perhaps not surprising for any of us for whom lavendar evokes long lost grandparents or for whom home is not home unless there are the smells of cooking wafting throughout. When I googled "smell and memory," sitting here in Bryn Mawr at Bryn Mawr College, this student paper (from Bio 202 in 2000) came up. Small world, whether virtual or not. For a tutorial on the sense of smell, click here. And for more, try here. Even if you do so, you'll discover the science is not all there is to the link of memory and smell -- as Harris's novel attests.
And oranges? What of them, these days beyond their link to Vitamin C? There was a controversy some time back regarding oranges qua fruit when Hobart and William Smith fans wore t-shirts to a Syracuse 
University lacrosse game (yes, Syracuse teams are oranges and/or orangemen). The t-shirts linked oranges to fruit. Somehow, our campus could not make the obvious link between calling people "fruit" and homophobia. So, today, I googled, in thinking about Five Quarters of the Orange, looking for a picture of an orange for the header. Up popped the t-shirt shown here. Yes, oranges are fruits. Tht t-shirt reads, in part, "Real Men Aren't Fruits." In the case of these particular shirts, the controversy is between those Syracuse fans with -- and without -- opinions about the teams' name. . . . Yes, fruit is a loaded term -- and masculinity of a very particular sort is strengthened by heteronormativity, by homophobia, by nastiness about fruit. This, of course, is a tangent and not Harris's point, though it definitely still matters. . . .
For interviews with Harris, click here or here or here or, one more, here.
Or, perhaps best of all, read the novel. I am not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps you will be. And you can ponder: is an orange a questionable edible? why buy the same novel twice?
