The Arrangement: A Novel

I couldn't get into this book. I found the characters dull and uninteresting, and the plot was super slow. Skip it!

In The Arrangement, novelist Ashley Warlick explores an interesting and controversial time in the life of of food writer MFK Fisher. Fisher is just beginning her literary career. Her husband, Al, is a writer, too, only he’s not able to produce anything, and their marriage suffers from his malaise. Fisher develops a strong attraction to another married man, Tim, with whom she shares her writing. This leads to a deepening intimacy and ultimately an affair. Warlick portrays this relationship with honesty and depth. It is a love story and a tragedy, as Fisher makes brave decisions uncommon for a 1940s woman. She follows her heart, and lives with the consequences.What dazzles in this book is the narrative. Warlick has an incredible gift with words, and her descriptive passages are as lush as MFK Fisher’s writing. She honors her subject, especially in her descriptions of food, of place, of senses.Reading The Arrangement is like partaking of an elegant, seven-course meal. One tastes each bite. One savors it. But mostly, one doesn’t want it to end.

I very much enjoyed this new novel by Ashley Warlick. I've read her other novels and enjoyed slipping back into her lush style of prose. Before reading the book, I knew nothing of MFK Fisher, her life or her works. As such, I found the book to be about an intriguing and complex personal situation, made all the more so being based on a real character.I absolutely love the rich and evocative food scenes. They had a sensual quality to them, which heightened the tensions in the novel and gave greater insight into the main character.Well done, great read!

I didn't care for this novel at all, but I kept reading it because I thought it was loosely based on a true story. However, it's basically fiction using the names of real people. How bizarre and disrespectful of those people.

Written in the style of MFK Fisher about MFK Fisher. An interesting piece about her private life. An enjoyable read.

I would wish in novels, such as this, that are based on real people- that there would be an author’s note somewhere to explain what is fiction in this story that is based on real events.If you have read or know the biography of MFK Fisher, you can see that this novel follows events that happened in her life. For those who do not know her not much is explained concerning her writing.MFK Fisher remains one, if not the preeminent writer of food and gastronomy. This book illustrates well her appetites for life, love and food. It follows her from the time of her first book publication in 1934 to 1943. During these years she fell out of love with her husband and in love with a friend and lived in Europe.The story adds thoughts and conversations and some ideas that acquaintances had concerning what happened in her private life. We see her thoughts and reasonings. It pulls you into MFK’s persona and into her deepest emotional state and private life. Her husband Al wanted a baby, but not the thing they had to do to make one. Her lover and then husband Tim regretted that he could not have children.The writing is done, at points in a somewhat vague style with some remembrances inserted into the story line. Still for anyone who is an admirer of MFK Fisher or wishes an in depth look into a life of one who loved and had a hunger for it, this would be a book that would be of interest.

The Arrangement is an exceptionally fine account of the coming to maturity of the great food writer MFK Fisher. It concentrates on a period of great change in her life, change that in retrospect seems rapid but that progresses, when one is living through it, with at times glacial slowness –when it will ever end? be resolved? At the start of the novel, Mary Frances is twenty- six. It’s 1934. She is married, to a would-be poet, but her husband, All, has pretty much given up on his writing and there’s no longer much to the marriage either. Mary Frances is another animal altogether: fiercely independent behind her conventional exterior, a free thinker, and unhappy with her life as it is. She’s always writing –while stirring soup or stew in a pot, slicing vegetables—she writes down her thoughts about food, about her past, her hungers, as she feels them, in note book after notebook. (In later passages in the book, a much older Mary Frances, nearing her death at 83, sorts through her hundreds of notebooks before they are carted away to be archived at Harvard; she throws out the ones she thinks too personal for public airing.) She has an affair, one night, with her husband’s best friend, Tim. He’s married too, to a would-be movie actress, but his marriage quickly sinks and burns. There progresses a three-year period of painfully drawn out tension, toward the end of which Mary Frances, her husband Al and her lover Tim live together, each doing his or her individual best to ignore the elephant in the room. What happens after that is shocking enough but it hews to the true story of Fisher’s life. This is a very lightly fictionalized account and where Warlick has filled in gaps –predominantly explicating Mary Frances’s, Tim’s, and Al’s innermost thoughts—what she writes has the flavor of truth.So there you have it, a novel about a brief liaison, the tensions that followed it, and the eventual resolution of a lovers’ triangle. But beyond that, this is the tale of a writer of genius discovering herself. She flounders around at the beginning but soon finds her stride writing about the subject that most intrigues her, the pleasures and back history of food, both high and low, sensuously described and extolled. There is a passage halfway through the book when Mary Frances, back with her parents temporarily and waiting for the publication of her first book of essays, is taken on by a pompous elderly reporter, who asks her, with a pseudo-polite sneer on his face, “What do you write about? Novels, like Pretty Princess [his name for another woman writer at the table] here?” “Hunger,” Mary Frances says. “I write about hunger for all kinds of things.” That’s what comes through in this first-rate book: the passionate nature that drove Mary Frances not to accept the limits of genteel living that her family, friends, acquaintance, nigh the whole world pushed her to accept. Early on in the novel, Tim, who was one of the first to see her essays, sent a draft essay back to her with his handwritten editings on it and he wrote: “You are the center of these stories.” She was. That’s what made her great. She wrote what she knew, had experienced, and was feeling.