![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s narrated by Tarquin Winot, a food writer who is, literarily speaking, a descendant of Humbert Humbert: grandiloquent, noxious, quite possibly murderous. with silent helpless quaking tears, rather than the usual curt library chortle of approval. It’s a novel that’s also a book of essays and a cookbook (really!), and it’s one of the very few books that’s ever made me laugh the way friends make me laugh, i.e. Which is why I feel such trepidation when I tell you that John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure is the funniest book I’ve ever read. (And, inversely, if you tell me that you find A Confederacy of Dunces or Catch-22 hilarious - those excruciatingly unfunny squatters at the top of every funniest-book list- then I immediately apply a fire-sale discount to your every recommendation.) The tone is light the stakes are grave. But if I tell you that I find Book X hilarious, and then you read it without cracking a smile, I’m gutted. If I tell you that I find Book X beautiful, and then you read it and find it clunky, well, taste is unaccountable. And thus my abiding fondness for such flawed snort-producers as Kingsley Amis and Stanley Elkin.īut funny writing - and writing about funny writing - is a funny thing. Thus my all but impermeable lack of interest in such solemn worthies as W.G. There’s no writer so good that she can get away with not having a sense of humor, and there’s no writer so bad that she can’t, provided she does have a sense of humor, get away with nearly everything else. ![]()
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