Book Review : A Successful-- and Goofy-- Entrepreneur

Big Chocolate Cookies by E. S. Goldman (John Daniel, publisher: $17.95; 245 pages)

“Big Chocolate Cookies” is an incredibly precious, wonderful, goofy rigmarole of a book. It’s great! It’s fun! It’s one of a kind! But part of the story behind the book is just as wonderful, just as goofy.

“Big Chocolate Cookies,” originally by Vann Tuh, was sent to a West Coast publisher, John Daniel, who had so far never published a full-length novel. Daniel read this one, fell in love with it, offered what his own press release calls a “token advance of $500.” Daniel thought he had a new Vietnamese writer on his hand. But Tuh’s “friend and business manager,” E. S. Goldman, who took care of Tuh’s correspondence, began to publish short stories of his own, and somewhere between bound galleys and the hard cover of this perfect little book, Goldman confessed that, yes, he was Tuh.

Goldman Mysterious

Why Goldman, a retired businessman, would want to do this is shrouded in mystery, but it’s just a little extra dazzle around an already dazzling novel. Something like “Big Chocolate Cookies” goes a long way to explain why writers love to write and publishers love to publish: For a modest $500, John Daniel was able to buy into a piece of fictional infinity, a novelistic eternal moment.

Telling the story of this novel doesn’t begin to get to how wonderful it is, and, in fact, it may be off-putting (just as some people will stay away from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” because they can’t stand cartoons). As the press release says, this is “a very funny streetwise novel about a kid from Harlem who became the richest man in the U.S.A. and a girl from Pittsburgh who played great jazz piano.” And like some of the finest art around, “Big Chocolate Cookies” is incidentally a handbook on how to live, how to play life like a big game and get the maximum amount of fun out of it.

Patriotic Novel

At some levels, this is a wildly patriotic novel. The author takes the position that, with luck and work, the lowest of the low can rise, over a period of years, to make the cover of Forbes magazine over the query “IS THIS MAN THE RICHEST OF THE RICH?” Arsdur, or Stiffy, is born in Harlem, and--for starters--begins to have great ideas: “I told mama the idea about ‘Big Chocolate Cookies’ before “amous Amos’ was born. I told her she could make them and I’d put them in a bag and sell them around.” His mama thinks he’s crazy, of course, and shoots that idea down. But, in World War II, Stiffy joins the Navy as a cook and meets Dill Emmery (what characterization! What dialogue! What elegance this writer has!), a Boston Brahmin with a heart of 24-karat gold who, after the war, nudges Stiffy into the big time: Instead of a restaurant in Harlem, why not a bar on Madison Avenue?

Appreciating the Obvious

So far, then, the novel is about the restaurant business and of the Navy and hard times. But, when the bar opens, by pure luck and the ability to appreciate what’s right in front of him, Stiffy hires 17-year-old Edna Bundige, a black girl from Pittsburgh who plays piano in the same league as Garner and Tatum. Restaurants! Rags to riches! And jazz too! What more can you ask?

What makes it all work, is the answer to that rhetorical question. The second half of this novel is devoted to money: The world of stocks, bonds, mergers, takeovers, high finance. And it is crashingly funny. What it is, with “Big Chocolate Cookies,” is that E. S. Goldman knows so much about everything, including the language he writes in, that when he gives all his characters happy lives with happy endings, you have to believe him. This book may be hard to find, but order it if you have to. It’s the BEST.