|
|
Book Review: The Epicure’s Lament Kate Christensen brings us the pretentious asshole in print. The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen. I have occasionally considered the possibility that the very fact of first person narration is enough to stir the reader to an irrevocable sympathy for their narrator despite all the reader’s better judgment. No matter how reprehensible and valueless a character might be, first person narration offers a precious opportunity for a character to develop and present a fully formed worldview that can integrate every regrettable decision. Kate Christensen’s third novel, The Epicure’s Lament almost seems at times to have been conceived as a literary experiment designed to test this very premise. Her protagonist, Hugo Whitter is a willing participant in this exercise by being completely forthcoming in describing himself as a grouchy, pretentious misanthrope rotting in his lonely family mansion. The theory holds water, as it turns out, and readers are helplessly sucked into Hugo’s miserable world. This development would be interesting enough on its own, but Ms. Christensen wisely makes good use of the considerable goodwill she’s managed to build towards Hugo while he smokes himself to death, spits venom at his older brother, alienates his wife and daughter, acts like a sleazy old lecher and oversees the considerable physical decline of Waverly, the once-great Whittier family mansion. She banks on the cautious tolerance the reader kindly extends to Hugo to slowly fashion one of the most interesting characters I’ve read in a long time. As the story unfolds in diary form, Ms. Christensen charges Hugo with the banalities of character introduction and development as well as basic physical description of locations. Hugo’s reduction of Rex’s Roadhouse to the sort of late-night cable movie cliché that “…holds an unassuming bar, some cracked red leatherette booths with scuffed tables, a dartboard, a cigarette burned pool table, and a jukebox stocked with old country-and-Western legends’ B-sides” presents the reader with the sort of man that sees everything in his world as a tiresome, hackneyed repeat of something that never held much value anyhow. Ms. Christensen is equally skillful in drawing character development out of Hugo. His eccentricities and flaws serve as a hall of mirrors to reflect every other character back upon Hugo as the common reference point. Hugo’s brother Dennis, the woman they share in Stephanie, Stephanie’s creepy husband Bun, Dennis’ wife Marie and Hugo’s own wife and child are all restricted by Hugo’s intensely idiosyncratic constructions of them. It seems limiting at first, as readers might feel left in the dark, simply assuming that Dennis must be something more than an asinine dope pretending to an art career. Instead, the limitation of Hugo’s perspective is actually liberating in that it allows readers to accept the intellectual honesty in Hugo’s solipsistic march towards death-by-cigarettes as opposed to the self-serving paternalism of Dennis. Accepting Hugo’s worldview is an absolute necessity for Ms. Christensen to entice readers towards Hugo’s eventual encounter with life outside the crumbling mansion of his life. His transformation is agreeable only to the extent that readers make it with him. Dennis surfaces at Waverly in the early moments of the book after being thrown out by his wife for reasons that remain obscured by both parties’ pretensions to civility. His estranged wife, Sonia, and daughter, Bellatrix, reappear at Waverly as the diary entries work through the late fall towards the cataclysmic Christmas dinner. As the dinner approaches, he is pulled kicking and screaming into exactly the sort of human connections he sought to avoid in his unflinching pursuit of pleasure and eventually, a lonely, painless death. His family becomes the source of a reluctant epiphany for Hugo and, though the story of the transformation of the angry bastard is as old as storytelling itself, it unfolds in a manner that manages to be surprising, charming and completely consistent. In Hugo Whittier, Ms. Christensen has managed to create a classic character and describe an event that is true in a way that only great fiction can discuss meaningfully. She demonstrates a unique gift to breath life into her creations that all readers should take the opportunity to discover. What impresses me most about The Epicure’s Lament is the only comment I could muster against it, that it is so carefully crafted and writerly that it borders on the impersonal, indicating that Ms. Christensen’s best work might still be on its way. Read more articles in Arts » |
What if Rupert's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal is just the beginning? Coming to grips with being famous on the world wide web. A reexamination of St. Patrick's worthiness as the don dada of Irish sainthood. The War Report: Storch versus Timbaland, Chimps versus Humans, Dick Cheney versus Iran. Compared to the thrill of going to war, getting out of one is a tiresome and humiliating business. The Game's new album is pretty good, Fabolous hires a private gumshoe and all Republicans are gay. |
