Visions of the apocalypse seem to haunt our collective imagination. War, pandemics, climate disaster — these scenarios feel closer by the minute, our fiction reflecting the perpetual anxiety of a world on the brink. C Pam Zhang’s apocalypse, though, feels fundamentally different. Not because it is thematically distinct, or because her story beats are anything radical; rather, because the novel sidelines the obvious social and political concerns in favor of a feast of the senses.
Set in the near future, Land of Milk and Honey imagines an earth deprived of flavor. When a smog originating from the United States overtakes the globe, agriculture becomes impossible, forcing the population to survive on a blandly nutritious mung bean flour. Our unnamed narrator, locked out of her home in Los Angeles due to a border shut down, leaves her stable job as a chef to pursue a position at an experimental research facility in Italy funded by an ultra-rich donor, one which promises to provide the biodiversity of ingredients she craves. Upon her arrival, though, it becomes apparent that what her employer requires of her is far more demanding than the responsibilities of a mere chef. Thus begins the protagonist’s descent into the bizarre realm of the eccentric elite, a world dubious in its morals yet decadent in its depravity.
Land of Milk and Honey is a novel of excess. Its lavish prose borders on the sexual as it describes the sensations of eating in near excruciating detail, unashamed by its hedonistic surplus of imagery. The exorbitant language often straddles the line into superfluity, but never fails to stylistically capture the indulgent excesses of its cast. The narrator, a woman of humble beginnings, struggles alongside readers to grow accustomed to the hyperbolic personalities of her employer, a stoic and idealistic Elon Musk-esque figure, and his daughter Aida, the brilliant yet spoiled mastermind behind their scientific endeavors. The father-daughter pair are unshakeable in their twisted convictions, so much so that they begin to feel more like exaggerated archetypes than authentic, empathetic human beings. The emotional cores of both characters boil down to cliche, a shortcoming particularly evident in figures so far removed from the concerns of common people that they become impossible to care for. Like Zhang’s language, Aida and her father are ultimately empty despite their grand and luxurious front.
Admittedly, the hollow portrayals of the characters surrounding the narrator are an inevitable byproduct of the choice of narrative perspective. Filtered through memory, reading Land of Milk and Honey feels like recalling a particularly vivid dream. Dialogue is expressed using italics rather than quotations, emphasizing how the events are more akin to surreal recollections than tangible occurrences in a way that feels reminiscent of the very real COVID-19 pandemic — how our memories of quarantine feel surreal, more like an extended nightmare than lived reality. In this vein, Zhang leans into her apocalyptic narrative as more of a hiatus from reality than a catastrophic extinction event, her narrator forced to parse through the events of the smog through the haze of memory. As a result, what we as readers see of Aida, her father, and the project as a whole are distillations of truth as experienced through the eyes of the narrator, a woman overwhelmed by her simultaneous admiration and aversion to the thoroughly alien sphere of the rich.
Yet not much is distinct about the novel’s narrator; this, along with the decision to keep her unnamed, plays into the novel’s half-hearted statements on race and gender. “It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman,” the narrator laments, expressing one of the few emotionally resonant sentiments in a novel that too often feels painfully detached. Her employer exploits her status as a marginalized chef to entice her into accepting the outrageous demands of the position, asking her to play into racial and gendered stereotypes in a manner that comes off as disturbing and fetishizing. The novel’s stance on this behavior is uncomfortably unclear, though this is in part due to the narrator who, understandably, is more concerned with finally achieving an elite platform after having been dismissed and belittled her entire career. Still, the novel’s troubling relationship with race is emblematic of many of its flaws: rather than outright ignoring the political and social implications of her world, Zhang touches upon them briefly without any meaningful or original exploration.
All too often, post-apocalyptic stories are imbued with romance, and C Pam Zhang follows suit. As with the indulgent nature of cuisine, the novel’s romantic moments skew heavily toward the sensual, manifesting as spontaneous acts of intense, passionate lust meant to reflect the most basic of human desires. Love in the emotional sense is present as well: the narrator’s mysterious employer is described by his daughter as a “romantic,” a characterization that, despite his aloof exterior, feels spot on for the mysterious billionaire. He, and the rest of the central characters, believe so strongly in the value of a good meal that it becomes their sole obsession, even as the sociopolitical climate around them crumbles.
As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that the true object of employer’s romantic infatuation is the past itself: like a 21st-century Jay Gatsby, he is convinced he can bring back all which has been lost to time. Our narrator buys into his grandiose ambitions, romanticizing the extravagant ego projects of her wealthy employer and, for the most part, turning a blind eye to any potential social externalities her position may entail. This romanticization of an idealized past is more than just your typical bout of nostalgia: it is primal, even prehistoric. In a land built by cutting-edge technology, Aida and her father seem paradoxically hostile toward modernity, yearning instead for primitive pleasures predating the technological age. It’s an interesting take on the visionary entrepreneur: a figure often revered for boosting humanity into its future, it’s refreshing to see the regressive tendencies of the archetype on full display.
As a whole, Land of Milk and Honey is blatantly contemporary in its sensibilities. A world at the whim of billionaires, foregrounded by governmental corruption, inequality, and environmental degradation is no far cry from our current era. Yes, the focus on implications for cuisine is unique, but also feels somewhat out-of-touch; each time a paragraph was spent richly detailing the erotic appeal of a strawberry, my mind inevitably wandered to all those left out by Zhang’s exorbitant prose. The working class is portrayed either as an afterthought, as ignorant Italian nationalists, or as decorative props for our protagonist. Whenever inequity is mentioned, any concerns the narrator has are cleverly shot down by Aida, implicitly suggesting that her genius makes her worthy of her elite status and paternalistic attitude. In attempting to reimagine the eco-dystopian novel, Zhang inadvertently neglects the elephant in the room; despite being a luscious feast of language, Land of Milk and Honey is ultimately lacking in nutritional substance.