The Epicure's Lament [Hardcover]

Kate Christensen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2004

For ten years, Hugo Whittier, upper-class scion, former gigolo, failed belle-lettrist has been living a hermit’s existence at Waverly, his family's crumbling mansion overlooking the Hudson. He passes the time reading Montaigne and M.F.K. Fisher, cooking himself delicious meals, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and nursing a grudge against the world. But his older brother, Dennis, has returned, in retreat from an unhappy marriage, and so has his estranged wife, Sonia, and their (she claims) daughter, Bellatrix, shattering Hugo's cherished solitude. He's also been told by a doctor that he has the rare Buerger's disease, which means that unless he stops smoking he will die--all the more reason for Hugo to light up, because his quarrel with life is bitter and an early death is a most attractive prospect.

As Hugo smokes and cooks and sexually schemes and pokes his perverse nose into other people’s marriages and business, he records these events as well as his mordant, funny, gorgeously articulated personal history and his thoughts on life and mortality in a series of notebooks. His is one of the most perversely compelling literary personalities to inhabit a novel since John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, and his ancestors include the divinely cracked and eloquent narrators of the works of Nabokov. As snobbish and dislikable as Hugo is, his worldview is so enticingly conveyed that even the most resistant reader will be put under his spell. His insinuating voice gets into your head and under your skin in the most seductive way. And as he prepares what may be his final Christmas feast for family and friends, readers will have to ask, “Is this the end of Hugo?”

The Epicure’s Lament is a wry and witty novel about love and death and family, a major contribution to a vein of literature that the author Kate Christensen has dubbed “loser lit.” It more than fulfills the bright promise of her lavishly praised previous two novels, and gives us an antihero for our time--hard to like, impossible to resist.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Christensen's two previous novels (Jeremy Thrane; In the Drink) were delightfully believable, sympathetic contemporary narratives filled with wry humor and appealing protagonists. Here she ups the ante, with loftier literary aspirations and succeeds masterfully. As a young man, Hugo Whittier dreamed of being a published poet and essayist. Now 40, with a string of failures behind him, he sits self-exiled at Waverly, the family home on the Hudson River, dryly churning out autobiographical notebooks while smoking fast and furiously enough to ensure his rapid, inevitable demise (he is suffering from Buerger's disease, "almost certainly terminal in patients who keep smoking"). Christensen keeps the entire work moving briskly with delicious sardonic wit ("More and more, as I contemplate my death, it strikes me as vital in some way to hedge my bets. These fragments here... I leave in lieu of a life's work, a series of achievements") as well as infectious, detailed references to M.F.K. Fisher's food writing and essayist Michel de Montaigne, who is the novel's chief inspiration. Throughout, narcissistic, put-upon Hugo is pulled into the lives of others, mostly family members, who suddenly descend upon him and disrupt his otherwise placid, predictable existence: the wife he hasn't seen in 10 years who seeks reconciliation, the on-the-verge-of-divorce older brother, the violin-playing 10-year-old who may or may not be his daughter, his "Fag Uncle Tommy" and even a hit man originally hired to kill him during his wild young gigolo, drug-dealing days. All have gravitated to the family residence by the novel's end, providing him with substantial material for meditations on art, God, pedophilia, justifiable homicide and his obsession with sex, among other topics. It all works because Christensen has created in Hugo an altogether appealing, irascible antihero, along the lines of Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys or Doug Willis in David Gates's Preston Falls. This is an impressive tome, one that tickles the funny bone and feeds the mind.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Hugo Whittier is a 40-year-old misanthrope who lives alone at Waverly, his family estate. He smokes incessantly despite the fact that he's been diagnosed with Buerger's disease, which, if he continues to smoke, will kill him. Hugo's protracted suicide is disrupted when his older brother Dennis arrives to live with him. Dennis is fleeing his failed marriage to Marie and wrestling with his feelings for Marie's married best friend, Stephanie. When Hugo meets Stephanie, not only does he tell her Dennis isn't in love with her but he also sleeps with her. And then a letter arrives from Hugo's estranged wife, Sonia, announcing that she and their daughter (whom he believes is not actually his child) are coming to live at Waverly as well. What's a curmudgeon to do? Hugo reluctantly begins to plan a grand Christmas dinner for this unlikely assembly and also plans to take his own life to escape the pain of his disease. Unexpectedly charming in some places, absolutely dastardly in others, Hugo is an utterly unforgettable character. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (February 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767910303
• ISBN-13: 978-0767910309
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,251,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bitter but tasty, September 23, 2004

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Epicure's Lament (Hardcover)

He's Holden Caulfield.... twenty-five years, one failed marriage and two abandoned novels later. Kate Christensen cooks up a morbidly funny story in "An Epicure's Lament," full of food and dysfuction with a dash of very twisted sentimentality. Sprinkle with cynicism, and let simmer.

Upper-crust, middle-aged Hugo was once a gigolo and an aspiring writer, but now he spends his days in a decayed mansion, cooking and reading essays by Michel de Montaigne, and occasionally having flings with young women. He has Buerger's disease, which is not fatal unless he smokes -- so he smokes a lot. But his life is turned upside down when his brother Dennis arrives, in the throes of a divorce.

Worse yet, Hugo's estranged wife Sonia is coming to stay with him, along with her daughter Bellatrix, who was born when they were together -- but isn't his daughter. Hugo is not too pleased by this, but he starts to like his not-daughter Bellatrix. Called on to create a Christmas feast for his fractured, dysfunctional family, ex-paramours and a former hit man, Hugo learns a bit about himself as he prepares for suicide.

No, it doesn't sound like a funny book. And it isn't. Not in a slapsticky, goofy way, anyway. Instead it's the morbid, deadpan humor that wins us over, wrapped up in Hugo's wonderfully self-centered thoughts. "Lately I'm finding myself increasingly embedded in other people's lives, which nauseates me and fills me with fear," he muses at one point.

But though I doubt he'd admit it, Hugo changes over the course of the book -- he gets a bit softer and more accepting. He still ponders rough sex, food, homicide, hypocrisy and writing -- yet he tries to deal with a local pedophile, and forms a bond with Bellatrix. In a way he's like J.D. Salinger's immortal Holden, cynical yet with a little softness under all the crust.

The supporting characters really do seem like real people -- some of them wear their hearts on their sleeves (au pair Louisa), and some are strange even to Hugo (Sonia, sometime lover Stephanie). And on the male side, gay Uncle Tommy provides some gossipy fun, while Dennis is a dull, stagnant devoted dad -- the opposite of Hugo.

"An Epicure's Lament" is an unexpectedly funny, bitter, bizarre book, with a cast odder than the Addams family. Kate Christensen struck gold with this dark gem.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I set out to detach myself from all human interaction", May 2, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Epicure's Lament (Hardcover)

Kate Christensen's In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane were enormously entertaining and portrayed, with a resounding heart and humour, people living on the edge of society. In the Epicure's Lament, she returns with Hugo Whittier - a former gigolo, once part-time drug trafficker and self confessed cynic. Christensen proves, once again, that she can combine rich prose, sparkling dialogue, with astute and detailed characterization. In this wickedly dark comedy, Hugo has been living a hermit like existence in his ancestral home of Waverly on the banks of the Hudson River. Hugo smokes and drinks too much, and when he's diagnosed with Buerger's disease, he throws care to the wind and embarks on a self-destructive and bitter path downward. Here he is, "a decaying forty year old man in his decaying childhood home at the ruined finale of a wasted life."

Hugo's peaceful, solitary existence is disturbed and his life is irrevocably altered when his brother, Dennis, newly estranged from Marie, his wife comes to stay, and Hugo's own wife with whom he has been separated with for ten years, also decides to visit with her daughter Bellatrix. To add insult to injury, in a moment of sudden sexual fury, he embarks on a highly charged affair with Stephanie, the wife of Dennis' best friend. Hugo is obstinate and vicious, and relishes interfering in other people's marriages and businesses; his dinner conversation is designed to provoke and he constantly riles his family with blunt, vituperative and nasty asides. But while taking pleasure in causing trouble, he regularly records his private and provocative thoughts in a type of articulate and eloquent personal diary - a diary that is filled with sadness, melancholy and regret

As Hugo moves steadily towards death, with pain a constant, he ponders on his looks - "an old fashioned haircut, and a shambolic frame," slightly padded with the after effects of many good meals and little exercise. He's wrung out and dried up and where solitude was comforting, there is now a deepening and intensifying "garum gloom." He has reached the end of his tenure in work and life, and midlife is like standing on a high peak looking down at the planes; "it's a congruence of life and death, ashes that you came from and the ones you're heading towards becoming."

Christensen has written an astute study of death and dying, but she also incorporates the themes of family, giving a totally fresh and modern view of the ties that bind people together. As always, Christensen's dialogue shines, her characters are absorbing, and her narrative startles with its sardonic twists and unanticipated turns. Full of word play and mythical jokes, the novel is packed with Hugo's hilarious, and sometimes satiric observations on love, life, family and especially sex. More ambitious and with a far more tightly focused structure than the previous two Christensen novels, The Epicure's Lament is still identifiable as classic "loser lit" and is an unqualified delight to read. (...)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hugo is destined to become a classic character!, March 2, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Epicure's Lament (Hardcover)

At 40, living alone in the family home, Hugo Whittier, an irresistible, irrepressible, uproariously droll curmudgeon, wants nothing more than to die --- except maybe to be left alone. As he sits in his room, he muses, he philosophizes and he complains constantly. Very little pleases him and he can barely tolerate interaction with others of his species.

Hugo does, however, love smoking and cooking --- and writing, although he would vehemently deny it. He tosses out a recipe here and there, but I'm not at all sure I would dare use any of them. In the first instance, for example, he left out one ingredient. (It showed up a chapter or two later.)

THE EPICURE'S LAMENT is set down in hilarious, and sometimes poignant, journal entries. Hugo writes volumes, filling three notebooks in the telling of his story and starting a fourth. In the pages, he rails against his dead mother with hostile invectives, remembers his dad lovingly and begrudgingly learns some good about humankind.

Hugo did not have a happy childhood, and his adult years aren't shaping up much better. Now, Hugo's life is coming to an end due to a rare affliction called Buerger's disease --- unless he makes some drastic changes in his lifestyle. Not surprisingly, he is unwilling to alter even one thing about his life. Quite the contrary; he looks forward to his imminent end. Residing in the home where he grew up, he has happily ensconced himself in the tower bedroom awaiting that end.

Unfortunately for him, his brother's marriage hits the skids and Dennis, a couple of years Hugo's senior, pulls up one day with a U-Haul and unloads his few salvaged possessions. As one would suspect, this doesn't sit well with Hugo, so he focuses on patching up Dennis's marriage --- in between trying to seduce the cashier at the corner store or his sister-in-law's au pair. To make matters even worse, Hugo's wife, who left him ten years earlier, returns with "their" (he denies that, too) child in tow and moves in alongside the two brothers. This only heightens Hugo's desire to hasten his impending death.

What seems like a predictable story most certainly is not. Several excellent surprises, all discovered through Hugo's caustically witty diaries, await the lucky reader. Ms. Christensen does an incredible job of writing from a man's perspective, especially that of a hermitic, solitude-loving, middle-aged man who is pretty much obsessed with sex and cigarettes. The outrageous voice she has given Hugo resonates with irritation yet exudes a sense of unappreciated intelligence. Petulance radiates from his every conversation. The man has an undeniable gift with words; he simply chooses to use mostly the gloomy and cynical ones. Hugo is destined to become a classic character. He is not one to be missed.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers