[In the following review, Howard remarks favorably on The Debt to Pleasure and compares the novel to Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.]

Ever since Humbert Humbert made his indelible assertion in Lolita, we've been counting on our murderers for a fancy prose style. Not only does Tarquin Winot, the tart-tongued and mesmerizingly daft narrator of John Lanchester's "gastrohistorico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophic" tour de force The Debt to Pleasure, not disappoint, he even provides a Lanchestrian corollary to the Nabokovian proposition—and an educated palate.

At a distance The Debt to Pleasure may look like the latest entry in that portmanteau genre, the novel-with-recipes, made so fashionable by Heartburn and Like Water for Chocolate. Indeed, the book is ostensibly structured as a galloping gourmet's ramble through the seasons as he discourses over-knowledgeably on all things culinary, studding his lectures with opinionated asides, erudite digressions, inflated (if mockmodest) self-assessments and discursive recipes that will send more than a few readers to the market and the kitchen. Even if most readers will twig pretty quickly to Lanchester's cleverly ironic narrative strategy, it must be said that Winot and his creator know their onions—and their shallots and their elephant garlic. In his toplofty way Winot manages to be consistently absorbing and even ecstatic on a groaning board of topics: odes to aïoli, diktats on daubes, bulls on bouillabaisse, reveries on repasts past. And not on food alone: See, for example, his riff on the personalities of French rivers, which finally proclaims with the thunk of authority the Loire to be "France's least obvious and therefore most compelling wine river." Care to argue? Part of the fun of The Debt to Pleasure is savoring how Lanchester, himself a restaurant reviewer and a literary editor, performs his ventriloquism, using Winot as a literal mouthpiece for his own interests and obsessions—another Nabokov specialty, of course.

We've all run into Tarquin Winot types in our lives: the compulsive lecturer who deigns to include us so flatteringly in the charmed circle of his well-buttressed snobbery, who at first strikes us as eccentrically engaging and then only gradually begins to seem more than a little … off. What initially seems to be Winot's poised self-absorption assumes by degrees the aspect of full-blown megalomania. In fact, not since the late Harold Brodkey have we encountered in art or in life such a monumental case of narcissism, so delusional a sense of the world's rapt attention and abject adoration—a lunacy quite impervious to irony or logic: "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." This hits the essential cracked Brodkeyesque note.

Cocksure, obtuse, increasingly sinister, Tarquin Winot is a brilliant creation—as compelling an unreliable narrator as we've had since Nabokov set the gold standard with Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire. They are alike in the grandiosity of their self-effacement and the monstrosity of their intentions. Like Pale Fire, The Debt to Pleasure's apparent subject becomes increasingly subverted by the narrator's tantalizing asides, oblique revelations and unbidden reminiscences, as Lanchester shrewdly practices his art of indirection. As Winot, writing in "real" time, crosses the English Channel and motors about France, we see, as from a corner of the eye, that he is wearing a wig, a false mustache and other items of disguise. Why? As he stumbles about Inspector Clouseau-ishly, apparently tailing a honeymooning couple, and fills us in on his family past, two inescapable themes emerge: a mammoth sibling rivalry with his deceased brother Bartholomew, a sculptor of large reputation; and the tendency of the people around him to die violent accidental deaths: subway mishaps, hunting accidents, gas explosions, wild mushroom misidentifications…. Pet hamsters buy the farm, loyal retainers are caught inexplicably thieving, and none of it ruffles Winot's composure.

It gradually dawns on us that Tarquin Winot is that familiar type beloved of ironists, the artist manqué. His particular specialty is the disappearing act—he just practices it on others. He loses no opportunity to denigrate his brother's accomplishments, and when questioned by a woman engaged in writing Bartholomew's biography, resolutely ignores or misconstrues her questions (to the point where he can refer to her as "my collaborator") and delivers an extraordinary apologia for what he terms "the artistic project which was to form my lifetime's work." He justifies himself as the murderer as Modernist, practicing "the aesthetics of absence, of omission," and speaks of "genuinely dissolv[ing] the boundaries between art and life, while radically challenging the boundarizing and conceptual structure of old aesthetics." (Artforum meets True Detective.) Later he develops this idea to its fullest extent: In comparison with the artist, "the murderer … 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." The murderer isn't a failed artist, the artist is a failed murderer—watch for this line of thought in the Menendez brothers' appeal.

Well, it was inevitable that somebody was going to write a high-toned serial killer novel with a literary pedigree, and considering the potential awfulness of such a book, we must be grateful to Lanchester for bringing it off so beautifully. He has conjured up an immensely stylish literary dish and served it with a wit and knowingness that will delight foodies and bookies alike. En passant, he has managed to compose a lovely English bouquet to French civilization; in this respect as in others, The Debt to Pleasure resembles another suave and intricate meta-novel of recent years, Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot.

For almost any other novel that would be quite enough. But there remains the Nabokov problem to be disposed of—or at least raised. How to acknowledge John Lanchester's immense debt to the master without on the one hand diminishing The Debt to Pleasure as a kind of Pale Fire Lite, or on the other suggesting that the book achieves quite (or anywhere near) that level of delirious invention?

This is of course cruel. Few people would have even risked climbing into the ring with Nabokov, let alone given him a respectable few rounds, as Lanchester has. That said, a more fruitful comparison of The Debt to Pleasure may be to the amusingly heartless black comedies made by Ealing Studios in the late forties and early fifties, in particular Kind Hearts and Coronets, another droll comedy of serial murder, albeit without the fancy aesthetics. Poised deftly between pure entertainment and flat-out art, those films, like The Debt to Pleasure, are marvelously civilized artifacts, unflappable exercises in high British comic style. (I kept casting Alec Guinness, then Peter Sellers, as Tarquin Winot in the movie.) That is why, classify his novel as you will, a good many readers are going to be deep in John Lanchester's debt for their reading pleasure.