Piece of Toast: A Life of Charred Bread details the life of Piece of Toast, from his early beginnings in a New York bakery, to his near-death run-in with the ruthless Rye Boys, to his type-casting as a theater prop, and finally his breakout role as the host of Saturday Night Live, with Jam. While ambitious in its scope and filled with trenchant details, especially regarding the early days of Piece of Toast (who can forget the episode with the rogue seagull, Ur-source of POT’s famous tagline: ‘You’ll never take me alive!’), A Life of Charred Bread ultimately fails to deliver, both in terms of pace and stodgy language. One wonders whether this work was ghost written by a struggling adjunct specializing in Victorian literature when one encounters overly ornate descriptions such as ‘Piece of Toast lay on his back, turned over butter-side down, as if to add a modicum of humiliation to their affront, when what appeared to be the figurehead of these furry highwaymen, one of whom thought he had seen the visage of Jesus upon the toasted surface of the toast, pounced…’(47). While it is understandable that such antiquated language may have actually been spoken well into the early 20th century, it poses a major distraction to the contemporary readership, a readership much more versed in the light stylings of Baguette or the aphoristic tone of Scone, for example. The other major deficit of A Life of Charred Bread is that while the memoir does relive much of Piece of Toast’s early days in remarkable detail, one is left in uncertainty about the vast stretch of Piece of Toast’s 20s and 30s, before he had become desiccated and subsequently canonized on account of his artistic depiction of Jesus on the Cross. If in fact Piece of Toast was the sole survivor of The Great Pigeon Attrition of the upper west side, where are the first-hand observations one naturally expects? While it is alluded that these were ‘dark years’, ‘years spent on the dirty Steppe’, ‘watching and waiting before the forlorn homeless brow’, full of ‘crumbs and nobodies, soggy, soggy, godless days’, the reader is given very little else to go on regarding what actually happened during this depressive era which, as we learn, only came to a close with the encounter with Raspberry Jam. Perhaps that is a matter for a future memoir, but it leaves an unfortunate taste in the mouth of an otherwise compelling story. It should also be noted that, as the tale is in places quite grim, the memoir should accordingly include several trigger warnings, i.e. pertaining to grill marks, the preparation of meatballs and Bruschetta, etc. Available from Rowan, Rowan, Rowan, and Littlefield, $19.99.
