You Or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

Chandler Burr is the scent critic for the

New York Times

and I have always appreciated his approach to the olfactory and the wonderful way he spins all sorts of webs of reference to perfume: for example, of "Notorious" by Ralph Lauren: "Yes, something’s there, but it’s detectable in the way that AM radio picks up ghost-like murmurings."
And what about this scintillating review?
"Perhaps the most impoverished way of conceiving of a perfume (or of describing one) is listing its raw materials. It’s like experiencing Ravel’s “Pavane” by reading the sheet music, or smelling James Heeley’s Menthe Fraîche by looking at its lab formula" in his review of "the sublime l’Eau de Tarocco,...crafted by the Ravel of perfumers, Olivier Pescheux."

When I heard Burr had written a novel, I had to get it. As soon as it was published. And how well it goes with my reading of Middlemarch! You, Or Someone Like You is a novel of ideas--how wonderful to find in a rather barren landscape of new fiction where ideas are typically as welcome as cockroaches. The novel begins as a Utopian fantasy: major Hollywood players are enticed to read John Donne, Anthony Trollope, WH Auden, John Cheeverand many others. A mother perceives her son in terms that she realizes come from Virginia Woolf's Orlando. You want to be in this woman's book club and you dream of discussing literature with Chandler Burr himself and hearing his perceptions of the special readerly but real scents of Wuthering Heights, Persuasion, and Main Street.

It's wonderful to read a book which embraces the intellect and the knowledge that great literature is a timeless guide to humans and deciphering all of your friends, colleagues, and neighbors. It's fantastic to read somebody who seems to understand Auden, Larkin, and Yeats. What makes this book a profound read, as opposed to a Utopian fantasy, is that our cicerone of literature, Anne Rosenbaum, has a crisis involving her husband and a less critical one involving her teen-age son.

Many readers might potentially object to the nitty-gritty of it all. You may feel as if you've been suddenly shunted from the almost idyllic pastoral forest of Ardenne to the rough sea-coast of Bohemia to be pursued by a bear--in the form of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, the book does not turn away from some of the most controversial and burning issues of today. I salute Burr for not trying to soften the issues.

I would say more, but don't want to go into the plot (I read it and found it to be a page-turner without having read any reviews, and I appreciated the freshness). It's a keeper and one to re-read. Highly recommended.