SOURCE: "Bulls on Bouillabaisse," in The Nation, May 6, 1996, pp. 66, 68.

[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...