The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not Your Typical Lad

This is an odd little book, but one that is hugely rewarding.

There is a trend in English writing towards "lad lit", by way of imitation of "chick lit".

Most chick lit that I’ve read (e.g., Kathy Lette – nobody does upwardly mobile English bourgeois quite like an Australian) seems to be at home in its genre, whereas most lad lit seems to me to be lost in imitation, as if the author was writing down to this level, while waiting to be discovered and offered the opportunity to write something more ambitious and literary.

Otherwise intelligent men descend upon this genre in the hope of generating some fame and filthy lucre (which might fund their indulgence in literary fiction), whereas women engage in it as either writer or reader with a sincerity and pleasure that men cannot seem to match.

"The Debt to Pleasure" is not quite lad lit. John Lanchester is made of Sterner stuff. He has been restaurant critic of the Guardian and deputy editor of the London Review of Books. He has a formidable intellect and presumably has a qualification akin to a Classics Degree from Oxford. He knows about food and alcohol (as does any quality journalist), but like the best authors he knows both how to write and how others write and have written before him. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

The Cook, the Critic, the Brother and His Biographer

Lanchester’s first person narrator, Tarquin Winot, is an entertaining and erudite food critic.

For about half of the novel, he outlines some favourite menus and tells wonderful stories about each course. If you’re a foodie, he’s just the sort of person you might love to sit next to at a dinner party.

Only, as he reveals more about himself, you start to realise there might be a reason he seems to have no spouse or partner. In the second half, we see him flirting shamelessly with Laura, the young female biographer of his sculptor brother, Bartholomew. His authority diminishes as he demeans himself and he becomes a more and more unreliable narrator.

Tarquin Winot has been compared with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. My reading of "Lolita" might be flawed, but I never felt that Humbert was unreliable. I felt that he was telling his truth and that it was transparent right from the beginning, even if it was distasteful.

Tarquin descends in our esteem the more we learn about him. If by half way through the novel we feel that we have befriended him, by the end of the novel we question our judgement and want to scamper away with our tail between our legs. I read the novel in 24 hours and, to the extent that my relationship with Tarquin was a one-night stand, it was one I regretted in the morning, at least metaphorically.

The Raw and the Cooked

The novel is easy to read, but there is a nice sophistication working beneath the surface.

On the one hand, it explores the cultural rivalry between French idealism and English empiricism, not just in food, but in philosophy, art and literature.

On the other hand, it works within a structuralist framework suggested by Claude Lévi-Strauss, that of the raw and the cooked.

In the novel, the cooked is civilized, while the raw is primitive or barbaric.

The first half of the novel is founded on formally structured menus. However, in the second half, the structure is abandoned, order breaks down, and relaxation, spontaneity and chaos take over.

Events descend into what the French, the Italians and the Americans would respectively call a debacle, a fiasco or a fuck-up.

Civilisation requires structure, we must be cooked and served in the correct sequence. If we seek psychic liberation, if we are only half-cooked, we, men in particular, will go off, like Tarquin, half-cocked.

Nevertheless, Lanchester quotes Walter Benjamin (without expressly identifying the source of the quotation) to the effect that “Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.” Perhaps, the distinction between civilization and barbarism is illusory? Perhaps, Tarquin symolises the illusion?

Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death

At first, Tarquin embodies the qualities of a sophisticated and knowledgeable bon vivant, one who enjoys the good life. By the end of the novel, he is quite the opposite.

Tarquin recalls a conversation with his sculptor brother in which he (Tarquin) contrasts the artist with the murderer:

"...one of the impulses which underlies all art is the desire to make a permanent impact on the world, to leave a trace of selfhood behind…to leave a memento of himself...

"The murderer, though, is better adapted to the reality and to the aesthetics of the modern world, because instead of leaving a presence behind him – the achieved work, whether in the form of a painting or a book or a daubed signature – he leaves behind him something just as final and just as achieved: an absence. Where somebody used to be, now nobody is.

"What more irrefutable proof of one’s having lived can there be than to have taken a human life and replaced it with nothingness, with a few fading memories?"

Das Ich und das Essen

Tarquin continues:

"If the artist’s first desire is to leave something behind him, his next is simply to take up more space – to earn a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention. This is routinely called ‘ego’, but that term is far too mundane to encompass the raging, megalomaniacal desire, the greed, the human deficiency that underpins the creation of everything from a Matisse papercut to a Faberge egg...

"...[the truth] is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac, venting himself in the easy sphere of fantasy rather than the unforgiving arena of real life…

“Why don’t people take Bakunin more seriously? Destruction is as great a passion as creation, and it is as creative, too – as visionary and as assertive of the self."

And so he concludes:

"The artist is the oyster and the murderer is the pearl."

It’s interesting that this philosophical and aesthetic debate occurs within the framework of food.

It’s almost as if the self is the Ego (das Ich) and everything else external, but food and alcohol that we consume, in particular, is the Id (or das Es).

To stretch the credibility of the argument even further, in German, Tarquin pluralises das Es, until it becomes das Essen (i.e., food).

I am what I eat, I do what I eat, and red meat implies a capacity to kill in order to survive.

Not Just Desserts

While "The Debt to Pleasure" is as entertaining, if not more so, than most English lad lit, it also reveals that Lanchester can write.

If nothing else, he has admirable influences.

While some might find the comparisons odious, I would place this very English novel midway between the French Marcel Proust (1) and the American Paul Auster, with a large dollop of Nabokovian playfulness and a sprinkling of Peter Greenaway.

I’m looking forward to his later works, including "Capital".



(1) One sentence occupies the whole of pages 198 and 199, only it flows so well in the Proustian manner, you don’t notice its length, until you get to the end of it (TWSS, anyway).




W.H. Auden's Martini

Tarquin Winot: "As a subsequent refinement [on the seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth of my aesthetic period], I borrowed W.H. Auden's technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime...and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes...the Auden martini is not diluted in any way...a 'silver bullet'."



In Search of Auden's Martini

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/artic...



W.H. Auden's Martini Haiku

Could any tiger
Drink martinis, smoke cigars,
And last as we do?



Heston Blumenthal's Version of Apicius' First Century Recipe for Calf's Brains with Rose Petals

http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes...



"The Imperfect Enjoyment" by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

This is the poem from which the title of the novel was derived:

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/...



The Debt to Pleasure

Once is not enough,
Why does heat desert your flame?
Is there then no more?


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