The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester, John Lanchester

From the Publisher

This astonishing first novel is narrated by the impeccably correct Tarquin Winot, who relates the story of his life through the most basic and sublime of human passions: food. An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin embarks on a journey of the senses as he peels away the layers of his past. Wickedly funny and poisonously opinionated, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. Gradually the outlines of a distinctly quirky aesthetic and a highly eccentric moral universe emerge, and the truth becomes unavoidable. This is not the voluptuary’s memoir it purports to be, and Tarquin Winot is ultimately the master of something infinitely, quiveringly sinister.

Publishers Weekly

Diabolically clever, Lanchester's debut novel more than lives up to its advance hoopla. This purported "unconventional'' cookbook-cum-memoir is a brilliant portrait of its narrator, a man whose professed gentility conceals a cold-blooded obsession and a sinister agenda. In a dry, supercilious manner, meant to display his soi-disant refined taste and superb erudition, Englishman and Francophile Tarquin Winot sets out to produce his physiologie du gout, a book that will include bona fide recipes (blini, fish stew), arcane culinary lore (the history of the peach), etymological disquisition (the origins of the words for coriander-from a variant of bedbug-and vodka) and fawning references to such culinary stars as Brillat-Savarin and Elizabeth David. Tarquin's commentary is larded with acidic bon mots, astringent asides and frequent invocations of figures ranging chronologically from Aeschylus to Auden, and culturally from James Bond to Luis Buuel. But what lies between the lines gives the narrative its insidious fascination, for in his casual references to the accidental deaths of servants, a neighbor and various family members, Tarquin gives away his true character, suggested by his early statement that "[t]here is an erotics of dislike.'' It is only gradually that the reader deciphers those clues and realizes that Tarquin is revealing far more than sibling rivalry when he insists that it is he-not his brother Bartholomew, a celebrated painter and sculptor-who has the true artist's genius. For those who appreciate linguistic virtuosity and light-fingered irony, who enjoy constructing a jigsaw puzzle out of tantalizing clues, this novel will be a lagniappe, fit for connoisseurs of fine food and writing. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB featured selections; first serial to Granta; audio to Audio Literature; foreign rights sold to 16 countries; author tour. (Apr.)

Library Journal

In his elegant and cunning first novel, Lanchester, deputy editor of The London Review of Books, disguises a sinister tale of fraternal jealousy as an innocent cookbook. Many of his ingredients and methods are indelibly linked to memories of his childhood and early life. As the stories and characters appear and reappear, subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in narrator Tarquin Winot's remembrances point to something slighly more threatening than a literary gastronome's memoir. The evocative connection between food and the past, and the act of writing and the past, is notable more for what it conceals than what it unearths. Lanchester's writing is to be savored, and the observations of his buffoonishly high-brow narrator merit more than one reading. Very highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/95.]Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

Lanchester's debut in the recent cookbook-cum-novel sweepstakes is a tour de force certain to please some highly, while others may be worn down by an incremental pace and unceasingly (if expertly) mannered tone.

What can be told without spoiling the tale—for there's a mystery here—is that the book is the story of a life, the life is that of an Englishman named Tarquin (originally Rodney) Winot, and Winot himself is the speaker of every carefully weighed sentence and exquisitely formed paragraph from start to end. A world-class chef and scholar extraordinaire (he calls himself an artist) of food and cuisine (not to mention manners, lore, and history in general), Winot hasn't lived a life that could be called underprivileged: With an ex-actress mother and an international- businessman father, both Winot and his older brother Bartholomew (who went on to become an internationally lionized artist and sculptor) were raised in a world of comfort and sophistication. Living both in London and Paris, the children had the benefit of cooks, nannies, and tutors—whose amusing quirks, oddities, and (above all) curious demises are narrated by Winot with customarily dry but unflaggingly amusing understatement and wit. As the book opens, the irrepressible Winot is driving through France, offering up opinions on the wines, foods, and art of Normandy and Brittany as he heads, ostensibly, for his house in Provence. He does reach the house, but things take on a deepened tone when he hooks up certain electronic spying devices, trails a young couple, and finally grants an interview—in which, to the reader, the increasingly mannered Winot at last reveals all—with a biographer- to-be of his illustrious brother.

From a raconteur second to none, then, a whole-earth monologue that lectures on subjects from pancakes to poison peaches, gives opinions on matters from clothing to curry, and touches on life's crises from cradle to grave. For the intellectual reader, a feast, complete with hint of decay.

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