If you’re a foodie, he’s just the sort of person you might love to sit next to at a dinner party. Lanchester’s first person narrator, Tarquin Winot, is an entertaining and erudite food critic.įor about half of the novel, he outlines some favourite menus and tells wonderful stories about each course. The Cook, the Critic, the Brother and His Biographer 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 has a formidable intellect and presumably has a qualification akin to a Classics Degree from Oxford. He has been restaurant critic of the Guardian and deputy editor of the London Review of Books.
John Lanchester is made of Sterner stuff. "The Debt to Pleasure" is not quite lad lit. 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. 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.
There is a trend in English writing towards "lad lit", by way of imitation of "chick lit". This is an odd little book, but one that is hugely rewarding.
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