A Crotchety Eat Pray Love (and Forget about the Praying)

The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen takes place in the mid-Hudson Valley with the main character, Hugo Whittier, stopping at Stewart’s every day for cigarettes and contemplating going to the Columbia County fair. I am easily hooked by local novels, witness my abiding love of T. C. Boyle’s World’s End.

Christensen has her characters be decadent descendants of Dutch settlers living in deteriorating mansions, displaying eccentricities associated with a too much inter-breeding or adulterous dalliances. Sounds like T. C., and is often funny, but very darkly comedic.

Hugo wants to be a recluse living off the family fortune completely disconnected from his family, contemporaneous and historic. He has an incurable debilitating disease that he intentionally exacerbates by smoking and drinking incessantly; oh and incidentally keeping a diary a la Montaigne.

His other literary hero is MFK Fisher as he fancies himself a gourmet cook. There is about as much culinary arts in The Epicure’s Lament as there is high fashion and style in The Clothes on Their Backs. Christensen’s few recipes remind me only tangentially of Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite – A Memoir of the Senses. When Isabel makes reconciliation mushroom soup, you know she is doing it to seduce her man; when Hugo pulls up nettles from his overgrown, weedy garden, while it might be equally mouth-watering, it is more of a metaphor of his prickly personality and his self-gratification.

But to interpret my not so cryptic review title, Hugo is a curmudgeon, but an oversexed one, hence the double entendre in crotchety. Like Gilbert’s book whose mantra is dine well and charm a loved one, Christensen loads her novel with themes of dysfunctional families, adulteries, illegitimate children, pedophiles, frustrated artists, aging homosexuals … all readers invited. Instead of coming across as a 21^st century Shakespearean romp, the pages are filled with omphalosceptics, all so self-focused that none are appealing memorable. Hugo is never as diabolical as Humbert Humbert. He is misanthropic, hypochondriac, never lovable. This is not an A+ read.