For a while, I thought John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut were America’s greatest living writers. One of the best classes I ever took in college was a Sociology of Kurt Vonnegut class. We read a bunch of sociology texts and a bunch of Vonnegut. If you really wanted to understand mid- to late-twentieth-century American culture, you needed to read some Updike and Vonnegut. Sadly, Updike and Vonnegut are gone now. So, who is America’s greatest living writer, now? Marilyn Hagerty. She writes for the Grand Forks Herald, the local newspaper in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Her restaurant column, Eat Beat, is perhaps the greatest writing on the internet.
The review of the new Olive Garden in Grand Forks is largely about the experience of going to Olive Garden, and it makes you look at Olive Garden in a new, non-ironic-hipster way. If Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim or Kilgore Trout ate in an Olive Garden, it would be this one. Marilyn Hagerty enjoys the sandwiches at the Big Sioux Cafe with her friend, Susie Shaft. Her reviews are masterpieces of spare prose describing the same universe Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater inhabit. If I was teaching a class in contemporary American culture, I would make the students read her columns.
Here, read her writing. You have to read more than one, to appreciate the nuance. Compare the review of Olive Garden to the one on Italian Moon:
Olive Garden, Big Sioux Cafe, Italian Moon, Blue Moose
Thanks to PenguinsinAk for finding this gem.
