The Food Chain - Hardcover

Nicholson, Geoff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879515082 ISBN 13: 9780879515089

Verlag: Overlook Pr, 1993

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geoff Nicholson is the author of twenty books, including Sex Collectors,Hunters and Gatherers, The Food Chain, and Bleeding London, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London

Rezensionen

Nicholson's stateside debut, a dark parable of appetites carnal, commercial and culinary, sets him firmly in the contemporary British mode of savvy, morbid humor pioneered by compatriots like Martin Amis and Pete Davies. L.A. wunderkind restaurateur Virgil Marcel is unprepared for the display of pathological gluttony that greets him at London's shadowy, invitation-only Everlasting Club, where members have been enjoying a nonstop orgiastic banquet since the Restoration. He is still more surprised to be subsequently swept off by an omnivorous English maiden on a mystery tour--more masticatory than magical--of English foods and fetishes. Virgil's bewilderment only deepens as he gradually uncovers a generational mystery that bonds the Everlasting Club's patrician sybarites, his English mother and his American father, demiurge of the Golden Boy fastfood restaurants, in a chain of appetite where desire may literally devour its object. A deft stylist, Nicholson adroitly dodges from sex to death to dinner and back, but after an uproarious opening his ability to ring the changes on his fable of consumption fades, while the profundities with which he garnishes the menu are stale at best. Readers will likely guess the Everlasting Club's dark but heavily signposted secret long before the final course, and may consider the club symbol--Ourobouros, the worm that eats its own tail--an apt enough motif for the imaginative but overelaborate dish Nicholson serves up.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Acclaimed British novelist Nicholson will make quite a splash with his first American release, a sly and bawdy culinary romp. This rambunctious tale of gastronomic excess and sexual abandon begins modestly enough in California, where Frank Marcel is despairing of ever making a go of his diner. Inspiration arrives when his English wife, Mary, takes a picture of their toddler, Virgil, chomping on a chicken leg. "Golden Boy" is born, and soon Frank owns a profitable chain of family restaurants. Virgil becomes an archetypal prodigal son who achieves a modicum of fame running his father's one trendy gourmet eatery in L.A. When he receives a rather enigmatic invitation to join something called the Everlasting Club in London, he readily accepts, but the club turns out to be an experience few could stomach. Its emblem is a snake swallowing its own tail, and its mission is to sustain a perpetual bacchanalia. So far, the party has been running nonstop for 350 years. As all the Marcels get tangled up in the club's epicurean intrigue, Nicholson, who maintains a devastatingly arch tone and brisk pace, presents us with scenes of both cheerful eroticism and taunting grossness, all the while flirting with the specter of cannibalism and the connection between consumption, power, and sex. Donna Seaman

Kinky food and sex games are the stuff of this high-energy black comedy from the British Nicholson, his fifth novel but first US publication. Virgil Marcel is flying to London as a guest of the ancient and mysterious Everlasting Club. Virgil is the obnoxious, spoiled rotten son of Frank Marcel, founder of the Golden Boy chain, Howard Johnson-like restaurants in California; the only work he's done since college is to revamp his father's one fancy restaurant, now the last word in L.A. chic. In London, a black chauffeur, Butterworth, drives Virgil blindfolded to the club, where his host Kingsley, an upper-class twit, explains the club's tradition of ``indulging in excess.'' Virgil eats and drinks with the same swinish abandon as the other members, all male, but gets into trouble when he French-kisses the naked girl who is the motionless table decoration. So begins this story of gastronomic and erotic debauch; Nicholson cuts between England (where Virgil will be kidnapped by the sexy dinner-table centerpiece, then rescued by the God-fearing Butterworth) and California, where Frank, in the course of investigating his wife's supposed infidelity, discovers his prized chef Leo ejaculating into the sauces. Nicholson sustains a tone of campy menace (by now there's a whiff of cannibalism in the air) as he brings all these characters to London in a plot that zigs and zags entertainingly, though with increasing improbability. Even more troubling, though, are the factual accounts of gastronomic and other excesses interspersed throughout. Aside from the borderline tackiness of linking those notorious modern cannibals, the Andean crash survivors, to the high jinks of the club, these passages suggest authorial obsessions run amok. Spicy fare, though some may find the aftertaste disagreeable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Overlook Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0879515082
• ISBN 13: 9780879515089
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar