Somehow, even the recipes work better uttered out loud. The novel was never really a novel, and certainly was never supposed to be a movie: it’s a five-and-a-half-hour comedic monologue, a full-on standup set complete with nested stories and sidebar digressions. The 2013 audiobook, read by Streep, is what “Heartburn” always ought to have been. Anyone who reads Ephron knows that her nonchalant conversationalism is the real engine of her magic, so it’s a little surprising that it took thirty years for “Heartburn” to take on its third and optimum media form. (“My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.”) The reason “Heartburn” didn’t land as a movie was because it watched Rachel Samstat through a camera, instead of watching everyone else through Rachel Samstat. The movie version of “Heartburn” makes clear that the best part of the novel is Rachel’s narration-her gimlet evisceration of her various crises, her close read of her own narcissism, her exquisite sensitivity to the social signifiers of the early nineteen-eighties, her off-the-cuff Borscht Belt punch lines.
Despite those sterling credits, not to mention Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in the starring roles, the film is unambiguously atrocious, a boring slog through yuppie malaise. Naturally, the novel became a movie, in 1986, with a screenplay by Ephron and Mike Nichols in the director’s chair.
It’s a short book, fun and maudlin and vicious, with recipes interspersed in the text here and there in a way that actually sort of works, though after a while the endlessness of Rachel’s misery begins to wear a reader down. The plot is low-stakes parlor drama-infidelity, family secrets, drunken marriage proposals, a little bit of genteel disorderly conduct. Now everything in Rachel’s life is exploding in slow motion. She’s recently become aware that her husband (“a fairly short person”) is not only having an affair with a woman in their social set (“a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed”) but had the audacity to fall in love with her. The narrator, Rachel Samstat, is a food writer and cookbook author in her late thirties, seven months pregnant with her second child. I can admit, with only a mild quaver in my voice, that although “ Heartburn”-Nora Ephron’s novel, from 1983, a fictionalization of the end of her marriage to the philandering journalist Carl Bernstein-is good, often great, with moments of real dazzle and zing, it’s maybe not the very best work in the vast Ephron œuvre.
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