New Orleans, 2014: Laurent Ladnier is a professional chef who has arrived at a critical juncture in his life. He will soon turn 40, and he feels that if he doesn’t realize his dream of opening his own restaurant now, it will never happen. Raising the stakes for Laurent is the fact that his father, a talented but ultimately unsuccessful chef, died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.

That’s the premise of THE FERTILE CRESCENT, a cookery-themed novel written by Chadwick Wall. When the reader first meets Laurent, he’s a well-regarded chef working at a popular New Orleans restaurant. As with most popular restaurants in New Orleans, the menu is Cajun-Creole: a crowd-pleaser that is, from Laurent’s point of view, restrictive and unadventurous. He aims to shake the city out of its complacency by starting a global fusion restaurant.

After being fired from his job (his boss does not approve of his culinary experiments), Laurent persuades a washed-up restaurateur to take a chance on him and his radical vision. Meanwhile, Laurent is trying to salvage his relationship with his girlfriend, financially supporting his widowed mother, keeping an eye on his drug-addicted aunt, and making inquiries about his father’s death.

As the new restaurant begins to take shape, one senses that Laurent is heading for disaster. The reader wants to care because Laurent, a quintessential everyman, is easy to identify with and like. But the middle section of the book is too slow and monotonous to contain the sort of tension necessary for an effective build-up. There is simply too great a focus on discussing food, such that the story itself begins to fade into the margins. After a 15-page segment depicting Laurent interviewing prospective kitchen staff, we witness him bringing his girlfriend into the restaurant to sample his menu—a protracted scene burdened with talk of ingredients, food presentation, and portion sizes. Sometimes the prose itself goes off the rails and becomes overwrought: “The wave crashed against my taste buds in the most magnificent way: that smoke from the quail’s gamey flesh, the richness and creamy texture of the poached quail egg, the turkey so moist that it almost seemed injected with something, it was all there dancing with abandon on the tongue.”

The climax, while surprising and dramatic, is not quite enough to recover the momentum lost in the book’s plodding second act. And some are sure to find the denouement a tad mawkish. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds well enough in presenting a flawed and sympathetic protagonist that the reader still roots for him all the way through.

Chadwick Wall’s THE FERTILE CRESCENT sketches an engaging portrait of New Orleans’ restaurants, clubs, famous hotels, and squalid underbelly. Alas, the book’s inherent drama is diminished by storytelling that is, at times, verbose and cumbersome.

~ Michael Howard for IndieReader