The Epicurean Psychopath or How to Murder a Book

When I was reading The Epicure's Lament, I saw a cross reference to The Debt to Pleasure, a book about another self-absorbed male, compulsive about food and Provence, who was described as an evil foodie. Tarquin Winot (is that "Win-ot" ... no I think, Why Not) is more a Ripley reprise.

Unlike Hugo Whittier in the Hudson Valley who at least attempts to portray his family members and contemporaries, Tarq is penultimately self-centered, keeping the references to his parents, brother and other family functionaries to highly interpreted asides, nothing of the nature of a direct quote and neutral portrayal. All the world is depicted through Tarq's mind.

He protests that this book is his journey through England and France as his taste buds are refined. But alas, through double entendres and interviews with a reporter interested in his brother Bartholomew's life, Tarq alludes to his murdering mater and pater, resident tutor, aforesaid brother, and finally boldly acceding to poisoning the interviewer and her husband, bragging about his knowledge of poisonous mushrooms and justifying it as mirroring I, Claudius.

Like Ripley, all these people get in the way of his complete enjoyment of the good life. He kills for an inheritance, to eliminate a more talented sibling, eventually just because he can. But unlike Ripley where the reader can be attracted to Tom's skill and chutzpah, John Lancaster's novel never makes Tarq appealing or in the end even interesting. Towards the end, where Lancaster intrudes using Tarq's voice to explain how he wrote this story, he says:

"Only the style of the book would remain consistent, driving, forceful (not), its stable nature underlying the chaos and limitless mutability of everything else in the narrative -- though it would no longer be clear if the book was a narrative since the essential mechanisms of propulsion, surprise, development, would seem largely to be forgotten ... gradually as the stability of lot and character fell away (well, that's reason alone not to pursue to the finish line), and all certainties became erased, the work would become more troubling ... until the appalled readers, unable to understand what was happening either to them or to the story... would watch the wholesale metastasization of the characters into one another, the collapse of the very idea of plot, of structure, of movement, of self, so that when the finally put down the book they are aware only of having been protagonists in a deep and violent dream whose sole purpose is their incurable unease." Ya think ya want to read this?

Again, closer to the end, Lancaster writes about the inferiority of an artist who creates something when compared to a murderer who creates the absence of someone. Tarq's rationalizing arguments at the summation evoke de Sade's writings of the self against all societal norms, because evil exists, because violence is common and unprosecuted in all instances. These debates are as bland and irritating as they were centuries ago.