Point of View

The novel is written from the third-person point of view. This third-person narrator is limited to the protagonist Piglet’s perspective. This means that the narrator inhabits Piglet’s consciousness throughout the novel and describes the narrative world according to how Piglet sees and experiences it. Because Piglet is an editor at the cookbook publishing house, Fork House, she has an intimate knowledge of and relationship with food. The way that the narrator describes grocery shopping, cooking, and eating authenticates this key facet of Piglet’s character. The reader might refer to a passage from Part 3 by way of example. At Waitrose, Piglet shops for ingredients to make herself dinner, choosing “[t]inned plum tomatoes—the good ones—and dried whole wheat spaghetti” (295). She then replaces “the spaghetti with a pale-yellow linguine, imagining its starchy flatness on her tongue” (295). The narrator’s keen attention to...