Literary Ascents and the Human Search for Meaning
Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel by C Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
Nearly 100 years ago, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain, acclaimed as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature. The novel follows the story of Hans Castorp, a young German engineer who travels to a mountaintop in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium. He intends to stay only for three weeks, but from the beginning, the reader knows that this outcome is improbable—the narrator comments that “from Hamburg to Davos is a long journey—too long, indeed, for so brief a stay.”
Indeed, the journey is too long for so brief a stay, as Hans Castorp soon succumbs to symptoms of tuberculosis himself, beginning a seven-year period in the sanatorium. While there, he meets a cast of characters who represent conflicting schools of early twentieth-century European thought. Lodovico Settembrini, in particular, defends Western, humanist ideals influenced by the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. Leo Naphta advocates for more authoritarian viewpoints. As the novel continues, witnessing Settembrini and Naphta’s debates and participating in robust discussions of music, art, and literature instigates Hans Castorp’s coming of age. A classic of the bildungsroman genre, the novel ends with Castorp’s presumed self-actualization and subsequent death after he descends from the mountain and fights in World War I.
Mann began working on The Magic Mountain in 1912, but did not publish it until 1924, and so the memory of World War I slouches around the edges of the novel. While works like Yeats’s “Second Coming” and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms evoke the fruitlessness and inhumanity of the war, Mann’s novel attempts to make meaning from it. As the narrator laments Hans Castorp’s death in the final pages, it is clear his short life was not for nothing: “Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?” (716). Six years after the Armistice, Mann still explores the beauty and resilience of the human condition in the face of crisis. The way Hans Castorp wrestles with Settembrini and Naphta’s conflicting viewpoints reflects Mann’s own intellectual journey--from nationalist supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm to opponent of Hitler. Ending the novel with such a question demonstrates his hope for the good of humanity and belief that we can make meaning out of catastrophe, despite the loss of his protagonist.
Nearly 100 years later, C Pam Zhang has written a novel about her own version of the magic mountain, Land of Milk and Honey. It follows her Booker-longlisted How Much of These Hills is Gold, and while critics generally agree that Land of Milk and Honey is the weaker of the two works, Zhang still has much to offer a world all too familiar with the ramifications of a global disaster.
In Land of Milk and Honey, the world is already in crisis when the novel begins, but Zhang addresses similar questions to Mann’s about the nature of humans in her characters’ quests for survival. A smog caused by the long-term effects of foolish industrial farming practices has overtaken the planet, causing 98% of the world’s crops to die. The world’s elite have found ways to escape this new way of life, starting communities for the ultra-rich at higher elevations that have not yet been overtaken by smog. Such places boast farms still capable of yielding meat and produce, and many attempt to circumnavigate government oversight of experimentation under the guise of smog-alleviating research.
One such community located in the Italian Alps posts an ad for a French-trained chef of the highest caliber. The unnamed narrator, who tells her story from a future, post-mountain-experience perspective, is a trained (but average) 29-year-old chef. Desperate to cook with vegetables again after years of making do with the remainder of preserved food and government-subsidized mung bean flour, she embellishes her resume and is hired on a 10-week trial contract. While Hans Castorp’s magic mountain seems almost whimsically mysterious in its ability to pull guests under its timeless spell, Zhang’s magic mountain is much more duplicitous. Her narrator’s stay is extended into a full contract based not on her cooking, but because her appearance allows her to be passed off as her employer’s wife, Eun-Young, who left him and his twenty-something daughter, Aida, several years ago. While the narrator’s employer manages the finances of the mountain, Aida is the mastermind behind de-extinction experiments beneath its surface.
Potential investors come to dine on Sunday evenings and the narrator’s role is to prepare and serve the food demurely under the pretense that she has taken a religious vow of silence, softening her employer’s image. The guests at these meals represent the supposed “best” of what the world still has to offer—rich heiresses, Musk-like potential investors, and some people who, like the narrator, have been brought to the mountain because of their skill, such as an Iranian meteorologist hired to analyze the smog’s progress toward the mountaintop. However, unlike Mann’s cast of characters whose intellectual idealisms help Hans Castorp to grow toward self-actualization, these figures convince the narrator of humanity’s innate selfishness. Their socializing is driven by their desire to impress Aida and her father in hopes of earning a spot on the famed “list”—the group of people that will be taken along to the next location when the mountain is no longer viable.
The food the narrator prepares for these dinner guests grows increasingly exotic as the novel continues and is all sourced from the mountain’s underground labs, ranging from wooly mammoth steaks to snapping turtle blood poured over ice cream. Even as she spends her days experimenting with the most sumptuous of ingredients and growing in her craft, the narrator ironically struggles to partake in the meals she creates, finding anything besides the mung flour which she had grown accustomed to in the flatlands to be nauseating. While the protagonist cannot enjoy it, much of the strength of Land of Milk and Honey comes from Zhang’s descriptions of food. The narrator describes a cake that Aida brought home for Eun-Young’s birthday party: “This cake was not the one I’d baked as an afterthought. This was a foot high, silky yellow, sighing under the knife. Like nothing I’d tasted before. Part air, part kiss of milk and honey” (112).
Meanwhile, the world starves below. The narrator is cognizant of this, but her relationship with her employer and the mountain’s mission becomes increasingly complicated when she develops a romantic connection with Aida. As the novel continues to bounce between descriptions of meals and amorous encounters with Aida, Zhang criticizes the pursuit of human pleasure in the face of such worldwide sorrow—none of these descriptions celebrate the joy of the human experience, especially as the narrator continually comments on the mountain’s deceptiveness and her conflicting feelings as she shares her memories.
Zhang also addresses how the flatlanders feel about the mountain’s “solutions” to the global crisis. When the narrator begs Aida to take her to Milan for lunch so she can get away from the cognitive dissonance she feels on the mountain, the two are forced to toss apples they brought with them at a gaggle of children to bait them away from crowding their car. The narrator watches as the children bite into and promptly spit out their first taste of fruit in many years, possibly ever. Their tastebuds have adapted to their mung bean flour diets to survive, underscoring the mountain’s unnecessary excess and its inability to understand what is truly required for survival.
It is after this trip—which ends with Aida accidentally running over one of the children—that the narrator’s position on the mountain fully unravels. As Aida and her father race to secure both funding and the technology necessary to leave the mountain and escape the encroaching Italian government, they host a staged, Renaissance-era-like hunt where lucky residents will take aim at a surprise species that Aida has released from her lab. The narrator is horrified to watch the hunters return with the carcasses of a herd of golden apes, the long-extinct primate most closely related to humans. The pile of roasted humanoid limbs that she is forced to serve solidifies her decision that she can no longer be part of this community. She confesses the deception behind her hiring to the Iranian meteorologist, knowing that he will share the information and that her employer will be forced to let her go, only to learn that the meteorologist also faked his identity in hopes of escaping the smog.
In The Magic Mountain, Mann’s characters argue their points of view not to save their society or save themselves, but because exercising the human intellect is valuable whether Hans Castorp survives the war or not. In Land of Milk and Honey, Zhang’s characters farce their way toward survival, demonstrating Zhang’s point that, when it comes down to it, humans are most predisposed not to the good life, but to self-preservation. And, despite their best efforts and ever-improving technological resources, they won’t always succeed. Soon after the narrator leaves the mountain, she sees on the news that a rocket headed to Mars, supposedly containing everyone who made her former employer’s “list,” has exploded upon launch, killing everyone aboard. It is presumed that those responsible (namely, Aida) cut too many corners to leave the mountain before facing real accountability from the Italian government. There are, however, also rumors that Aida and her father were not on board the rocket and that its launch served to distract the public from their actual new home. The novel’s publication date makes it unlikely that this explosion is directly referencing the OceanGate implosion in June 2023. Still, Zhang’s novel provides an apt warning against the hubris of the world’s ultra-rich experimenting under the guise of the future “common good.”
The novel ends with the smog lifting just a few years later because a new species of dandelion has emerged, capable of clearing the air as it germinates. This dandelion was not created by humans, suggesting that just as the flatlanders adapted, the planet is more capable of evolving through crises than we give it credit for. The narrator lives out her days as a renowned chef, restaurant investor, and philanthropist, remembering her year on the mountain as a traumatic experience. However, she also inexplicably journeys to Beijing and Seoul each January in search of Aida, as they had promised to meet there one day during their parting conversation.
Mann’s point that love can still distinguish and redeem humanity even in the face of World War I is clear at the end of The Magic Mountain. But what can we make of Zhang’s conclusion? Can her protagonist and Aida’s love for each other truly overcome the horrors of gluttony, abuse, and selfishness that abounded on top of the mountain? The fact that the protagonist and Aida never reconvene suggests not. And, Aida’s failure to save her community, much less the world, paints a dismal picture of humanity’s inclinations in times of crisis. In a society ever plagued with political division, war, and the threat of environmental disaster, this view is tempting. But, as Zhang’s narrator travels through Asia in search of Aida in the novel’s final lines, she tells us, “I look for a long, long time” (232). Despite their differing views on human nature, this search suggests that in the end, perhaps both The Magic Mountain and Land of Milk and Honey assert the power of hope in making meaning from catastrophe.
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado. She will soon be reviewing her way through the Booker long list for us!
