John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

painted clocks & knockout flurries

“The word debacle suggests the going-wrong of an elaborately conceived plan: a disaster that somehow leaves the principal parties not only having lost what they were aware that they were risking but much more besides, as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favorite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife, the loss of one’s job, collapse of one’s marriage, one’s bankruptcy, turn to violent crime, and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police — when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise.”

There’s no writer so good that she can get away with not having a sense of humor, and there’s no writer so bad that she can’t, provided she does have a sense of humor, get away with nearly everything else. Thus my all but impermeable lack of interest in such solemn worthies as W.G. Sebald and Cormac McCarthy. And thus my abiding fondness for such flawed snort-producers as Kingsley Amis and Stanley Elkin.

But funny writing — and writing about funny writing — is a funny thing. If I tell you that I find Book X beautiful, and then you read it and find it clunky, well, taste is unaccountable. But if I tell you that I find Book X hilarious, and then you read it without cracking a smile, I’m gutted. (And, inversely, if you tell me that you find A Confederacy of Dunces or Catch-22 hilarious — those excruciatingly unfunny squatters at the top of every funniest-book list— then I immediately apply a fire-sale discount to your every recommendation.) The tone is light; the stakes are grave.   

Which is why I feel such trepidation when I tell you that John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure is the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s a novel that’s also a book of essays and a cookbook (really!), and it’s one of the very few books that’s ever made me laugh the way friends make me laugh, i.e. with silent helpless quaking tears, rather than the usual curt library chortle of approval.

It’s narrated by Tarquin Winot, a food writer who is, literarily speaking, a descendant of Humbert Humbert: grandiloquent, noxious, quite possibly murderous. He’s lip-smackingly vivid and self-certain when discussing food:

“Northern European readers will need no further elaboration: the ‘stodge’ term, the stodge concept, covers a familiar universe of inept nursery foods, hostile saturated fats, and intentful carbohydrates.” 

And preening and oblivious when discussing himself:

“I myself have always disliked being called a ‘genius.’ It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term.”

He is, in other words, that common and commonly botched thing: an unreliable narrator. The trouble with unreliable narrators (those narcissists who think they’re humble; those psychopaths who think they’re sensible) is that they’re too reliable in their unreliability. They’re like clocks running fifteen minutes fast. The time is wrong, yes, but consistently wrong, obviously wrong — the author stands proudly before his faulty clock, winking, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the bit when, despite its being one PM, the clock will read one fifteen.

But Winot is unreliably unreliable — an atomic clock one moment, a painted clock the next. He’s frequently delusional, ridiculous, un-self-aware (“my artist’s nature isolated and separated me from my alleged fellowmen.”) But there are also, throughout the book, dozens of genuinely lovely insights — about food, about psychology, about language — that are nonetheless true to the demented mind that thought them up. In The Debt to Pleasure we can do what in life we wouldn’t dare: we can linger long enough beside a madman to enjoy the odd angles of observation afforded by his psychosis, to admire the shine that the extreme pressure of his mental processes gives the rough stones of ordinary experience.

 Late in the book Winot is recounting the suspicious death of Mitthaug, the “counterstereotypically garrulous and optimistic Norwegian cook” his family once employed, and he finds himself contemplating the word debacle (which he, naturally, renders as débâcle): 

“The word débâcle suggests the going-wrong of an elaborately conceived plan: a disaster that somehow leaves the principal parties not only having lost what they were aware that they were risking but much more besides, as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favorite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife, the loss of one’s job, collapse of one’s marriage, one’s bankruptcy, turn to violent crime, and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police — when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise.”

What fun it is to type out this sentence! Winot’s insufferability and menace are there (the dandyish voice, the deranged specificity of the scenario), but so is his brilliance. Debacle really does connote just such an inordinate loss — but until Winot unpacked it for me, the word’s subtleties were rattling around inside its Frenchified casing, inaccessible.

And look at the comedic genius of the sentence’s structure. A boxing match is, despite popular belief, rarely decided by a knockout punch. The loser is much more often felled by a series of punches, delivered in a devastating and relentless rhythm — one punch that sets him reeling, another just at the moment when he could have righted himself, still another while he sinks toward the canvas. 

Lanchester lands a solid blow with the first bit of the imagined scene (as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favorite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife) — if the sentence ended there, it would make me snuffle appreciatively, but it wouldn’t stop me. But he immediately unleashes a flurry of smaller, ancillary scenes (the loss of one’s job, collapse of one’s marriage, one’s bankruptcy, turn to violent crime, and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police) and then, after granting you the deceptive breather of an em-dash, he delivers the hook that actually knocks you, or anyway me, into reading-interrupting paroxysms ( — when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise).

The sentence is a kind of inverse debacle: you set out thinking you might gain a useful definition; you end up on your back, having absorbed an entire miniature action movie, happily aching from the pummeling. 

Though you may, it pains me to admit, experience nothing of the sort.