SOURCE: "Movable Feasts," in The New York Times Book Review, April 21, 1996, p. 9.

[Prial is the wine columnist for the New York Times. In the following review, he relates the events of The Debt to Pleasure and praises Lanchester's writing ability, made more impressive by the author's status as a "debutant novelist."]

Tarquin Winot, an English esthete and gourmand, remembers the time when, as an impressionable 11-year-old, he was taken to lunch at his older brother's boarding school. It was a meal "Dante would have hesitated to invent." In particular, he recalls "the jowly, watch-chained headmaster" plunging his arm into a vat and emerging "with a ladleful of hot food, steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning."

"For a heady moment," he says, "I thought I was going to be sick."

It was a defining experience in young Tarquin's life. "The combination of human, esthetic and culinary...