Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

disappointed
I purchased this book for a friend and for me as a holiday read because the reviews were really good.We're both in the food profession and I thought it would be fun to read a fiction work (rather than non-fiction).I also thought this sounded different from other fiction/food books I'd read in the past.Well, unfortunately, food does not take the center stage and, as my friend noted, the author does not sound like she likes her main character.The plot has some interesting twists and turns and it's journal format is interesting.However, I wouldn't say that the focus was on food at all.I definitely enjoyed quite a bit more.

the smoker's lament
This book is funny, charming, and very well written.It's a pleasure to be inside the head of her wonderfully misanthropic narrator - the most sociable hermit I've ever come across.Christensen is even good at funny sex scenes.But I didn't quite buy the epicure part of the book-- the cooking doesn't play into the plot nearly as well as the smoking and the recipes are kind of backwoods for a post 9/11 gourmet.The author also is compelled to soften all her funny dark humor toward the end too much.But, all in all, an extremely enjoyable read.

The Epicure's Boredom
The central facts of the epicurean trajectory, that it is a series of leapfrogging escalations of pleasure that end always in boredom and disgust and that its justifications are propped up with the romantic scaffolding of the gallows, is so thoroughly avoided and then subverted in this book as to cause a crisis in incredulity: Why, I find myself asking over and over, doesn't our hero put a bullet in his head and finish it?If his beloved cigarettes give him one minor zing first draw in the morning and taste of ash the rest of the day, why bother except that quitting takes work?If the whisky bottle provides only solitary dullness instead of social buzz, what then?And, as Kate Christensen insists in endless numbers of paragraphs, if even sunsets and trees and views of a river changing in the light can't provide pleasure without each brief meditation on them ending in jarring sarcastic subversions, the genre-necessitated introductions of little black details that startle us from our reveries, why not overdose and be done with it?How can such cynicism and self-hatred, the kind constructed for literary affect and never, in my experience, witnessed in real people, hold the attention of a reflective reader?

I mean, really. Look at Hugo's back-story:the romantic childhood of suicidal father and withering [s]mother, the old money, the spurned yankee propriety.Look at the oh-so-dramatic pas-de-deux of Hugo and his worshipped/resented big brother.Look at the sexy trouble Hugo gets into in school, followed by his absurdly cliched tramping in Europe.He was even a kept boy and flaneur in Paris!What is all this except romantic doodling around the edges of what is essentially a tale of boredom, muddy thinking, and protracted suicide?I came to this book looking for something bracingly real, and what I find is a thinly-constructed stageset, mostly smoke and transparent associations, with all the existential crisis of waiting in line at the DMV.

The text is occassionally leavened by sardonic humor and by good deadpan observation, so I've awarded the book a few arbitrary stars.But even that feels generous.I am left with the overwhelming impression not of wit but of literary posing.My mental picture of the author is of a black-clad, dull-eyed poseuse, cigarette in languid white hand, practicing her impassive face, burning inside for critical recognition.The picture feels plausible because of that burning hope.Without it, no book.Without it, pathetic Hugo was a boring corpse long ago.

good book
This is a nicely-written, fun, easy read.Author is intelligent & has a great sense of humor!

Yum
As far as story goes, this one's lacking. This is not the most compelling book I've ever read. It is, however, one of the best-written character studies I've read.
I loved Hugo Whittier, despite his horribleness. He has a lot of unappealing characterstics. He's a drunk, a womanizer, and a deadbeat. But he's also a brilliant writer, and a highly intelligent cynic.
As far as language goes, this book has it all. Beautiful prose, biting sarcasm and cynicism, sick humor, and obscenity. I burst out laughing at some one-liners every now and then while reading this book.
All in all, you're not supposed to love Hugo as a person, but you can't help but love him as a character. ... Read more