Rom-Com Meets Dot-Com

By GABRIELLA STERN

Two sisters of marrying age, a single man in possession of a good fortune, a handsome rogue, a pack of peculiar relatives, lots of overinflated stock options—it's "Sense and Sensibility" meets "Pride and Prejudice" in Y2K U.S.A. Allegra Goodman's "The Cookbook Collector" is a skillfully crafted, engaging novel about love and loyalty in an era that feels almost like ancient history: the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Ms. Goodman's spotlight shines most intensely on the younger of the two sisters, Jessamine Bach, a winsome, rather confused 23-year-old graduate student in philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. She is caught between two lovers—environmentalist Leon, who is on a save-the-trees crusade, and stolid millionaire George (thanks, Microsoft), who runs a used bookstore and collects rare books for himself. Jess's 28-year-old sister, Emily, is the ultra-focused, level-headed chief executive of a California Internet start-up called Veritech. She becomes an overnight multi- millionaire following the company's initial public offering. Her boyfriend, hard-driving Jonathan, enjoys his own perch atop a tech company in Boston; he is IPO-enriched, too.

The Cookbook Collector

By Allegra Goodman
The Dial Press, 394 pages, $26

So much of consequence has happened in the past decade that it is almost hard to remember the giddy days of the dot-com boom, when the highest anxiety for many people was whether or not to plunge in and try to make a fortune as so many others had. Ms. Goodman deftly brings to life the insane roller-coaster ride of the era.

"On the upswing, every Veritech employee felt masterful," she writes of the company's wildly varying stock price. "Now those masters felt like leaves tossed in unexpected storms." When Jonathan's shares tank, he takes "the debasement personally. His high-flying company was about to be delisted, too small to register on the Nasdaq stock exchange."

Despite the energy Ms. Goodman puts into recapturing the bubble era, "The Cookbook Collector" is, at its core, a romantic comedy centered on Jess. She exists in another sort of bubble: a university town. Her love-life is in turmoil because she is living in Leon's communal house full of environmental activists, and she finds his virtuous green militancy attractive. But she works part-time during the day at George's used bookstore, where the boss finds himself falling for his employee. A turning point is his pursuit of a trove of ancient cookbooks, a deal clinched with Jess's clever assistance. She becomes the curator of the cookbook collection, working out of George's elegant mansion.

As she immerses herself in the recipes, Jess becomes increasingly fascinated by food and its pleasures—and George himself. He gives her a ripe peach: "She washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist." Cupid, that's your cue.

The cookbook project also gives this aimless young woman a sense of purpose as she works to solve the mystery of the collection's provenance. Uncertain origins are something Jess can appreciate: She and Emily don't know much about their own provenance. One of the book's many plotlines concerns the sisters' efforts to get beyond the little information that their mother provided before she died when they were children: She had been disowned by her family when she, a Jew, married outside the faith.

The disparate concerns of "The Cookbook Collector"—dot-com dizziness, environmentalism, bibliophilia, Jewish identity—could have resulted in literary mush, but they turn out to be the ingredients of a satisfying tale.