Not all sweetness - or light

January 10, 2010|Diane White, Globe Correspondent

Katharine Weber’s marvelous novel about candy is a reminder, if we need one, that people and things we take for granted may have extraordinarily complicated, amazing histories. Randy Susan Meyers’s sensitive story about the legacy of domestic violence is painful to read at times, but unforgettable. And Barbara Delinsky proves once again a perceptive observer of family relations, delivering a tautly emotional story about mothers and daughters tested by a teenage pregnancy pact.

Besides being a vividly imagined story about love, obsession, and betrayal, Weber’s “True Confections” is a lively pocket history of the American candy industry. It’s an irresistible combination. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s story takes the form of a legal affidavit in a battle for control of a business, a first-person account of her 33 years at Zip’s Candies, a family-run, New Haven candy factory, as well as her own version of the firm’s history.

Zip’s Candies was founded in 1924 by Eli Czaplinsky, a Hungarian immigrant, with, family legend has it, money he may have stolen from New York’s Jewish mafia.

The names of Eli’s candy bar creations, Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos were inspired by a library book, “Little Black Sambo,” which Eli used to teach himself English. Zip’s candies have thrived, even with their politically incorrect names. But now the company is rent by internecine struggles. Company president Sam Ziplinsky, Alice’s father-in-law and mentor, has died. His son and heir, Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, Alice’s husband and Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush, has gone off to live his “real life” in Madagascar. Howard’s sister Irene wants to sell Zip’s and is suing Alice who, with her two children, owns a controlling interest in the company.

Alice came to work at Zip’s after high school, following an unfortunate incident in which she burned down her best friend’s home. Branded “Arson Girl” in the media, her early acceptance to Middlebury rescinded, she had to find work. “A certain burnt sugar and chocolate aroma hung in the air,” she writes of her first day on the job, “that marvelous, inevitable, ineffable, just-right aura of Zip’s Candies . . . I have loved that smell every day of my life from then to now.”

Alice is a passionate narrator, minutely observant, given to irony, and perhaps not entirely reliable. But after many years of psychoanalysis, she is determined to tell the truth as she sees it. It’s a story that ranges from pre-war Budapest, to Madagascar, where the Third Reich wanted to establish a colony of European Jews, to the All Candy Expo in Chicago where Alice makes a regrettable decision involving white chocolate.