Tarquin divides his journal with an ideal menu for each of the four seasons. He also assumes that she is secretly smitten with him. He assumes, right up to the denouement, that an attractive young writer who comes to interview him is engaged on his, not Bartholomew’s, biography.

Lanchester provides considerable wit along the way, particularly in the gradual undermining of his narrator’s urbane tone and his expansive certainty that the world will eventually recognize him as the real genius of his family. The deaths are divulged casually, minor details in the course of Tarquin’s ebullient menu writing, philosophizing and peculiarly suspect food-and-travel journal. She kills herself, and over the years various others-a cook, a tutor, Tarquin’s parents and eventually his brother-die in odd assorted ways. His second was to frame his nanny over a missing bit of jewelry so that she would be fired before she could tell on him. His first artistic act, as a child, was to smash a papier-ma^che elephant his brother had made. Bit by bit, as he spins out theories and tendentious recollections, sets out seasonal menus, discusses the difference between stews that require sauteing and those that don’t, he drops hints of how this actually works. Tarquin’s art, therefore, is not to create things but to make them disappear. Not creative passion but creative dislike is the highest aesthetic force, he argues: Passion puts you at the mercy of reality, dislike keeps you free. His real art, in contrast to his sculptor brother’s vulgar production of objects, consists in imagining things and not producing them. His admirers (they will turn out to be imaginary) have persuaded him to do so, he tells us, even though food is merely an avocation-”a shaving from the master’s workbench”-and not his real art. “The Debt to Pleasure” begins as Tarquin is about to undertake what purports to be a gastronomic tour of France, in the course of which he will keep a day-by-day diary.

It is a second pastiche: this one of Humbert Humbert’s wordy pursuit of Lolita, Quilty and his own delusions through the American landscape. Gradually another story emerges: Tarquin’s comically far-fetched-and far too discursive-tale of a revengeful chase through the French landscape. This leads, in a pastiche of Proust’s celebrated madeleine, to a series of variations on food and memory. In blatantly unreliable tones-urbane wit punctuated by howls-Tarquin begins his memoir as a spoof of highbrow cookbook writing. John Lanchester, a British literary editor and food critic, has done Cain and Abel as elaborate parody.

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester