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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
"I set out to detach myself from all human interaction", 3 May 2004
Kate Christensen's In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane were enormously entertaining and portrayed, with a resounding heart and humour, people living on the edge of society. In the Epicure's Lament, she returns with Hugo Whittier - a former gigolo, once part-time drug trafficker and self confessed cynic, Christensen proves, once again, that she can combine rich prose, sparkling dialogue, with astute and detailed characterization. In this wickedly dark comedy, Hugo has been living a hermit like existence in his ancestral home of Waverly on the banks of the Hudson River. Hugo smokes and drinks too much, and when he's diagnosed with Buerger's disease, he throws care to the wind and embarks on a self-destructive and bitter path downward. Here he is, "a decaying forty year old man in his decaying childhood home at the ruined finale of a wasted life."Hugo's peaceful, solitary existence is disturbed and his life is irrevocably altered when his brother, Dennis, newly estranged from Marie, his wife comes to stay, and Hugo's own wife with whom he has been separated with for ten years, also decides to visit with her daughter Bellatrix. To add insult to injury, in a moment of sudden sexual fury, he embarks on a highly charged affair with Stephanie, the wife of Dennis' best friend. Hugo is obstinate and vicious, and relishes interfering in other people's marriages and businesses; his dinner conversation is designed to provoke and he constantly riles his family with blunt, vituperative and nasty asides. But while taking pleasure in causing trouble, he regularly records his private and provocative thoughts in a type of articulate and eloquent personal diary - a diary that is filled with sadness, melancholy and regret
As Hugo moves steadily towards death, with pain a constant, he ponders on his looks - "an old fashioned haircut, and a shambolic frame," slightly padded with the after effects of many good meals and little exercise. He's wrung out and dried up and where solitude was comforting, there is now a deepening and intensifying "garum gloom." He has reached the end of his tenure in work and life, and midlife is like standing on a high peak looking down at the planes; "it's a congruence of life and death, ashes that you came from and the ones you're heading towards becoming." Christensen has written an astute study of death and dying, but |
(30)
£7.19
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