Sweetbitter

“I was never good at the future. I grew up with girls whose chief occupation was the future—designing it, instigating it. They could talk about it with so much confidence that it sounded like the past. During those talks, I had contributed nothing.”

This quote characterizes Tess as uncertain about her future. She hasn’t internalized and identified with social pressures to determine her future; unlike the other girls she knows who construct their futures. Tess is therefore malleable, open to new experiences, but also unsure of herself.

“Whatever it was, just being a backwaiter, a server, a barista—at this restaurant I wasn’t just anything. And I wouldn’t call it being a fifty-one percenter because that sounded like a robot. But I felt marked. I felt noticed, not just by my coworkers who scorned me, but by the city. And every time a complaint, a moan, or an eye roll rose to the surface, I smiled instead.”

Tess starts identifying herself through her role with others at the restaurant. She takes pride and joy in her work because it’s exciting, fast-paced, and makes her feel like she is part of an exclusive club. Without a fully formed identity of her own, Tess hangs on to feelings of being noticed or marked. Being a part of something larger than herself, even when it’s isolating and stressful, makes her happy.

“Simone maintained power by centrifugal force. When she moved, the restaurant was pulled as if by a tailwind. She led the servers by her ability to shift their focus—her own focus was a spotlight. Service unfolded in her parentheses.”

Simone is a natural leader, and Tess becomes instantly attracted to Simone’s experience, knowledge, and aura. In this quote, Danler characterizes Simone through her power and influence. There is a grace to Simone’s work that makes the job of a server seem more than waitressing; this adds glamour and sophistication to Simone’s characterization and by extension the restaurant.

“He knew part of his job was to be looked at. He was a quiet bartender. There was a submissiveness to his beauty that was nearly feminine, a stillness that made one want to paint him. When he worked the bar he submitted. Women and men of all ages left business cards and phone numbers with their tips. Guests gave him gifts for no reason—that kind of beauty.”

Jake is characterized through his beauty and his subtle awareness of that beauty. Tess is as taken in by Jake’s beauty as the many guests who give him gifts and leave him their numbers. Unlike Simone whose influence controls the energy of the restaurant, Jake is passive and submits to his role at the restaurant. This highlights an important distinction between these two characters.

“I was used to being alone. But I’d never been aware of so many other people, also alone. I knew that all over the south side of Williamsburg people were staring at their ceilings, praying for a breeze to come and cure them, and like that I lost myself. I evaporated.”

Tess’s loneliness dissipates with the knowledge that the city is full of lonely people. The paradox of being alone while simultaneously surrounded by thousands of people who are also alone is part of the charm and enormity of living in a city. Tess finds comfort in being part of something larger than herself. Thus, the city symbolizes unity and community even in loneliness.

“You’re only beginning to learn what you don’t know. First you must relearn your senses. Your senses are never inaccurate—it’s your ideas that can be false.”

Simone’s lesson on senses is a metaphor for the ways in which our interpretations of the world around us are what misleads us. The metaphor extends to our instincts; just as Tess must relearn her sense, she must also trust her instinct over her interpretations.

“They were so well versed in that upper-middle-class culture—no, in the tastes of upper-middle-class culture—they could all pass. Even most of the cooks had gotten an Ivy League education at Cornell before they spent a second fortune at CIA. They were fluent in rich people. That was the fifty-one percent of it.”

What differentiates the employees at Tess’s restaurant is their ability to seamlessly be part of multiple worlds at once. They have knowledges and experiences that help them navigate the interests of their wealthy customers, even though their lives outside of work don’t reflect those knowledges and experiences. This quote emphasizes the restaurant as a special place unlike other restaurants. It also serves to highlight how little Tess knows about the world and how much she has to learn.

“And people too, with their secret crafts, their secret fluency in other languages. The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don’t know what you don’t know.”

As Tess starts to figure out the dynamics between the people she works with, she learns about the currency of secrets. Tess is not yet intimated in these dynamics because she has no secrets. This quote emphasizes her youth and inexperience relative to the grittier world going on in the lives of the people she works with.

“What I didn’t misunderstand was the attention that she gave me. Or that by being close to her, I was always in proximity to him. There was an aura that came from being under her wing, with its exclusive wine tastings and cheese courses—the aura of promised meaning.”

Tess has believed so deeply in Simone’s supremacy and sophistication that her attraction to Simone is really a desire to be seen by someone so superior. Tess puts Simone on a pedestal, so any attention that Simone gives to Tess is a sign that Tess is also special. Important to note here is that Simone’s aura is one of “promised meaning,” which means that Tess projects meaning onto Simone without discovering herself what that meaning might be.

“Then one day I learned that there was an invisible ravine running up the city, as deep as the Grand Canyon, narrower at the top. You could walk in tandem with a stranger on the sidewalk and not realize that he or she was not on the same cliffside as you. On one side, there were the people who lived there, and on the other side, terminally distanced, were the people who had made homes there.”

The ravine underneath the New York City streets is a metaphor for the deep chasm between Tess and other people. As close as she may feel to the others at the restaurant, she is still alone. They don’t really know her, and she doesn’t really know them. This quote and symbolism reveal Danler’s message that people are inherently alone in their journeys toward Self-Discovery even when surrounded by others.

“I was polishing knives at the front hutch when I heard my name. It sliced me, my name that I hadn’t heard in months. Suddenly. I saw the version of myself who had never come to the city, never fallen down the stairs, or said anything stupid. She was safe and as good as dead.”

Tess remains anonymous for the majority of the book. Here, Danler doesn’t reveal her real name. The name Tess is representative of the life she left behind, not the life she has now. It’s disconcerting and disruptive for Tess to be reminded of that life. This also highlights Tess’s struggles with her identity formation.

“You’re all terrified of young people. We remind you of what is was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you’ve taken as you’ve grown cynical, dumb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don’t have to compromise yet. I don’t have to do a single thing I don’t want to do. That’s why you hate me.”

In figuring out that older people project the resentments of their lost youth onto her for being young, Tess starts the process of appreciating her own youth. She observes others the way they observe her, but she uses her observations to reinterpret what she wants out of her life. In discovering what she doesn’t want, she can start the process of figuring out what she does want.

“But the flaming center of my fantasy wasn’t the sex. No, what I wanted to get to was after. We would still be trapped in the elevator. He would look at me. There would be no bar tickets, no crowds, no phone calls, no stripes. He would be forced to recognize me. I knew that if I could get him to see me, then both of us would stop being lonely.”

This quote is an example of how Tess projects her own desires for herself onto Jake. She believes that she and Jake are similar in their loneliness. She believes that she can fill a hole for Jake that will make him less lonely, and vice versa. But this is a fallacy on Tess’s part because what she’s truly trying to address is her own loneliness. Her fight to get Jake to truly see her is a projection of her own insecurity that she can’t see herself.

“I could tell you to leave him alone. That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”

Simone directly warns Tess against falling in love with Jake. Tess projects her desires onto Jake, but Simone truly knows Jake. This quote foreshadows the long-lasting damage that Jake and Simone will both have on Tess’s development of self. Tess mistakenly believes that damage in her youth can help her grow, but she doesn’t yet realize what Simone has learned from experience—that some damages are replicated and turn into permanent scars.

“I couldn’t stop touching my face, the blank screen that everyone projected onto. Whatever beauty I had, it wasn’t self-generated, wasn’t rooted. It was permeable. But underneath that, I could just make it out: the face of a woman.”

Tess considers her beauty and tries to analyze it as though her beauty can indicate the woman she’ll turn into. Tess craves womanhood because she enjoys the prospect of stability of self. She believes that becoming a woman will come with the security and happiness of self-knowledge. This quote demonstrates that Tess’s character development and coming-of-age story is slowly but surely occurring.

“He was the only one who had seen me before the sheer terror of my training, before I had become mute and emerged with a different voice. He was the only one who knew. And always this feeling that he was not just in charge of the mechanics of the restaurant, but that he was puppeting us by cords tied to our unnameable aspirations and fears.”

Howard is an important presence in Tess’s character development because she fears that he has seen her, or at least the person she once was. Tess wants to be seen in authentic ways, but she doesn’t reckon with what that might mean for someone who knew her when she was awkward and unsure of herself. Howard is also a powerful force in the restaurant because he seems to know everybody’s goals and insecurities. He is a reader of people, and this frightens Tess because she doesn’t want to be read by him for fear of what that might reveal about herself.

“When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.”

The narration of this novel is told in hindsight, with an analysis of what youth was like. Tess the character is naïve whereas Tess the narrator is experienced. This quote foreshadows certain damage and destruction in Tess’s life through the metaphor of a sponge, as she absorbs any and all influences around her.

“People walked obliviously underneath me. Inside lit windows I saw people fulfilling their real lives, I saw minutes that counted. I was expanding, it wasn’t just the job anymore, not just the restaurant, but I was finding a place in the world.”

Tess starts discovering her identity through being a New Yorker. Just like the millions of people around her are living a life she knows nothing about, she too is living a life that is meaningful to her but otherwise anonymous. This is paradoxically freeing because it highlights that Tess is building her self-autonomy in spite of the anonymity of the city. Because of this anonymity, Tess is free to pursue her interests and desires without judgement. She is alone, but she is not alone in being alone.

“Everything I had ever learned about the two of them bound them more securely, squeezing out all the air, all the light. Why was I the last one to learn anything, and why when I thought I learned something did the bottom drop out of it?”

The more Tess learns about Jake and Simone, the more distance is built between her and them. This is a paradox that Tess can’t rationalize. She feels excluded because she doesn’t understand their dynamics. This quote is important because when Tess starts figuring out how uncomfortable she is with Jake and Simone’s relationship, she can start figuring out who she is without them.

“At least he was consistent—his enunciation, his expression said that it was nothing. I was too sensitive, dramatic, hysterical. His certainty always disabled my thoughts, like in this moment when I searched for my words, for my anger, and found a void where my reason had been.”

This quote is important because it highlights Jake’s negative influence on Tess’s sense of self. The use of the term “disabled” in referring to her own thoughts is proof that Tess gives Jake too much power over herself. Whether purposefully or not, Jake gaslights Tess’s emotions and makes her feel that her feelings are invalid. This makes her confused about her own interpretations and instincts.

“But at that moment I didn’t want him. The man I was totally and completely devoted to was going away with another woman, and I was so fucking blind and tolerant that they thought I wouldn’t have a shred of feeling about it. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care. Finally—facts not colored by the weather or the voices and visions in my head.”

Tess’s attraction to Jake fades as she comes to terms with the dynamics of their relationship. In this quote, Danler highlights the betrayal Tess feels in not being told about their trip, though her issue with Jake is about more than just the trip. This quote is important because it’s a moment of plot development in which Tess confronts Disillusionment and Experience.

“Had I learned anything besides endless reference points? What did I know about the thing itself? Wasn’t it spring? Hadn’t the trees shaken out their greens to applause? Isn’t this what you dreamed of, Tess, when you got in your car and drove? Didn’t you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn’t care if it loved you back?”

Tess moved to New York City in search of adventure. This quote emphasizes youthful longing for exciting life experiences that are subject to disappointment. Tess has understood that she could experience pain in her pursuit of adventure and life experience, and this quote is a reminder of how she dove deeply into her new life in New York. She had no way of knowing if she would get hurt or not and at the beginning she didn’t care because she understood that there could be risks within that adventure.

“Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I’d been denied entrance, all the times I’d asked permission—but it was my city too.”

This quote presents New York City as a symbol of freedom and potential. Ultimately, what Tess needed for her character development was the city and not Jake or Simone. Her job at the restaurant which she loved was also just a microcosm of the city and therefore unimportant to her now that she’s diving back into the unknown of the city.