'Pastries' lacks key ingredients

Proust had Paris and madeleine cake to stir his soul. In "Pastries," Seattle author Bharti Kirchner's latest novel, celebrated baker Sunya Malhotra has her luscious Sunya Cake, which draws chocolate lovers from all over Seattle to her cozy bakery in Wallingford.

Sunya's bakery "Pastries" is a star in the Seattle food scene, mentioned regularly and glowingly in the local press. But competition is on the way. Cakes Plus, a chain bakery, is moving into her neighborhood. Sunya wonders if her customers will stay loyal: Can her little shop survive a Bakery War?

Beyond her nagging business worries are personal ones. Sunya has just broken up with her boyfriend, and even worse, she is beginning to lose her baking touch.

Kirchner's prose has an easy, unhurried style. Her talents as a cookbook author translate smoothly into fiction. We can smell her mouth-watering desserts right off the page:

"I hover over the second batch of chocolate mixture, breathing the buttery mist, until the correct temperature, the glossy stage, is reached. At last, I swirl the dry ingredients into the moist ones, working more quickly than usual, particles of flour rising around me."

What is lacking in "Pastries" is any real interest in a narrative structure. Once Kirchner introduces her characters, they don't expand. They turn up like familiar signposts on Sunya's journey to find wholeness. Even Sunya, yearning to create romance and a spiritual center, has a kind of sameness from beginning to end.

And Kirchner does nothing with what could have been a great comic device: that Bakery War. "Pastries" is a kind of chic "Masterpiece Theatre" novel — Seattle-style. An L.A. movie director lover, a French head baker, a food critic, an ex-boyfriend activist, a pushy businessman, a working-class mom, even a Japanese baker guru — they are all there, new stock characters for the 21st century.

Add the missing ingredient, satire, and we will have the perfect foodie novel.