THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030747
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
THE DEBT OF PLEASURE
JOHN LANCHESTER
Henry Holt. 251 pp. $20.
The Debt to Pleasure arrives with more advance buzz than any other first novel of the spring, and understandably so. It may well be the funniest, most ingenious novel of the year.
Written by John Lanchester, the deputy editor of the London Review of Books, it tells, most wickedly, the story of Tarquin Winot, a foppish and acerbic English food writer. While at first appearing to be a rambling, digressive rumination on food and its place in culture, The Debt to Pleasure turns out to be a carefully controlled, cunningly thought out book with a bevy of surprise twists.
The Debt to Pleasure is a comic novel, and the most impressive thing about it is the way that Lanchester maintains his ironic tone to the end. Many comic novels tend to wander off. But Lanchester is unremittingly ironic, so much so that the book begins to wear about halfway through. Then it perks up, splendidly.
John Updike has said that a book reviewer should give an example of the author's writing whenever possible. That is a problem in The Debt to Pleasure, as Lanchester has packed more clever, sometimes hysterically funny lines in the book than one would think humanly possible. Here's Winot on eating lamb:
``Lamb is of course the meat most closely associated, in the Christian tradition, with ideas of violence and sacrifice - in fact, even the most robust of us self-contentedly pagan moderns have been known to experience a slight flicker of distaste at the imagery of the born again being rinsed in the blood of the lamb . . . And indeed the disturbing literal-mindedness of Christian imagery is seldom as apparent as it is in the practice of eating lamb at Easter. I mean, really.''
Or his thoughts on the time of Henry II:
``England would then have been a significantly more livable-in country than it is today - with a sweaty, uncouth, but hardworking and properly subjugated Anglo-Saxon peasantry securely in its place, and a Norman nobility making the transition from opportunistic plunderers in longboats to tapestry-commissioning, French-speaking castle-dwellers, an early but very spectacular form of social climbing and self-improvement.''
Such exquisite name-calling! Such formidable invective! One recalls Mencken, Bierce, Waugh at their best. Winot sees the world as something created to amuse him, and he amuses himself by deconstructing it mercilessly. He's the sort of fellow who, five seconds after meeting you, is thinking:
``Too fat. Hideous shorts. Haircut of a private in the Rumanian army. And where on earth did he get that accent?''
As Winot meanders from discourses on fish stews, cheeses, omelets, peaches, spices, aperitifs and a host of other gastronomical topics, Lanchester gradually, subtly shows that his protagonist is more than the cultured, sophisticated raconteur he purports to be. For one thing, through casual admissions, he makes evident a deep resentment of his brother Bartholomew, a well-known artist. And it seems that several people close to Winot come to, well, bad endings.
Indeed, Lanchester is a master of misdirection and omission. You learn that Winot is an unreliable narrator, one who, though terribly engaging and informative (you'll learn more about foods and their history than you can imagine), is also quite a nasty, unfeeling chap. He'll go on for pages about the qualities of the peach, then slip in off-handedly that he accidentally poisoned his brother when they were children.
The Debt to Pleasure may be too arch to some, and at times too clever by half. But it's an original: fresh - conceived and composed with a sure hand - and, indisputably, vastly entertaining. Without overdoing the obvious allusions to food, it's a book to savor. MEMO: Tim Warren is a free-lance writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. by CNB