SOURCE: "Food Has Become a Tasty Plot Device," in Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1996, p. 1.

[In the essay below, Daily discusses the prominent role that food has played in numerous literary works and cites A Debt to Pleasure as the most recent example of this trend.]

"This is not a conventional cookbook," suggests the preface to John Lanchester's new novel The Debt to Pleasure. And despite carefully worded directives for making flawless lemon tarts and meltingly tender roast lamb, an entire chapter devoted to aioli, the potent French garlic sauce, and as thorough a discussion of bouillabaisse as exists anywhere, it most clearly is not a cookbook.

It's delicious to read, though, a fictional feast chronicling the life of Tarquin Winot, an Englishman with a big appetite for culinary observations ("We then sat down to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent") and diabolical ideas about how to...