Sweet 'n' Lowdown
Sweet and Low
Rich Cohen
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $25)
Before ingenious people began to work in corporate labs, brand-based think tanks and test kitchens, there was a different breed of inventor. Regular old people, who sat around their kitchens or garages, happened upon something, and refined it till they got it right. Which, we learn in Rich Cohen's new book, Sweet and Low, is exactly how in 1930s Brooklyn, Ben Eisenstadt, Cohen's maternal grandfather, came to develop the formula for the world-famous sugar substitute Sweet'N Low. From the Sweet'N Low idea, the family company, Cumberland Packing, was born, and with it came the beginnings of a scandal.
Inventions, fortunes and scandals-Cohen covers it all in a deft and funny narrative that spans almost a century of family history. But your Big, Fat, Saccharin Wedding, Sweet and Low is not. Cohen suffers from none of the myopia that plagues your garden-variety memoirist. Instead, he takes a step back from his relatives and investigates the particular pieces of American history that determined his family's trajectory.
The kaleidoscope of Americana can be, at times, a little bit dizzying. A partial list of cultural histories that Cohen investigates: Jews in New York, the rise of the diet craze, the history of carcinogen-related anxiety, and, of course, the annals of artificial sweeteners. But Cohen's peripatetic style works because he has a home base. Just when you feel like you've strayed too far, you find yourself back where you began: with a family.
If Cohen's patience for wading through old court documents and financial records proves he's got stamina, his willingness to defame members of his family proves he's got balls. Cohen paints Uncle Marvin, heir to the Cumberland Packing throne, as a con man, but his harshest words are reserved for his grandmother, Betty (Eisenstadt's wife), who manipulated her husband, played favorites with her children and disinherited Cohen's mother and her progeny. This gives Cohen's exceptional candor about his mother's family some important context.
Cohen acknowledges early on that inheritance or no inheritance, to claim impartiality about one's own family is ridiculous. To demonstrate his bias, he tells a great anecdote about his mother: when he was sick at camp one summer, she chartered a Cessna to rescue him. How could we expect objective reporting about such a woman?
But in the end, Sweet and Low is not about Cohen's grudges or his sacred memories; it's about a lively and human family-and about their particular version of the American dream. In a way, that harkens back to Philip Roth's American dream novel, American Pastoral: Cohen explores what it meant to be new to America and to have ambition, how that ambition morphed and shifted and shattered throughout the 20th century, and how a fractured family emerged-richer (if not sweeter) for their history.