FICTION: Sustenance, By Elizabeth Wassell, Liberties Press, 241pp. €12.99
BOOKSHOPS ARE CRAMMED with cookery manuals to suit every possible taste. Newspaper weekend supplements all have a restaurant critic, often along with a chef columnist and a wine guru. Television schedules abound with culinary programmes. One of the fastest routes to celebrity is now via the kitchen. People seem to have an endless appetite for cultural product about food.
Elizabeth Wassell’s new novel, her fifth, is set in the world of high-end restaurants. American exile Lily Murphy, a restaurant critic, is assigned by her London magazine to cover the booming restaurant scene in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The book is scaffolded by a variety of restaurant reviews of fictionalised Dublin eateries, representing Lily’s journalistic output. There are lingering descriptions of food, both positive and critical, as Lily eats her way through her daily workload.
She meets Nicholas Savage, a gifted chef from Belfast, and the narrative of the book is the story of their romance, as each chips away at the other to eventually uncover a hidden past. Both Nicholas and Lily have softened their home-place accents in order to deny that original part of themselves as they inhabit this new foodie nation.
In the world created by this novel, ritualised dining represents a triumph of the cultured over the brutish, the best that stylish civilisation can offer. Both Lily and Nicholas have sought refuge in this world from certain barbarisms in their past. In Lily’s case, her mother subjected her to tirades of emotional abuse at the family dinner table, where Lily and her father ate while her mother drank gin and smoked cigarettes: “If meals are sacraments then ours were a black mass.” Lily, born in New York but schooled in England, has a profound unease about her Americanness. She associates her suburban American upbringing with her abusive mother and with all that is coarse in life. Her settling in Europe is an act of both familial and cultural rejection.
Nicholas came from a tough Belfast loyalist background and escaped to Dublin in order to pursue his love of food, which was kindled in the home of a Belfast Chinese schoolfriend. At his friend’s house he encountered “Chinese broccoli, ginger, coriander, little glistening dumplings full of pork or seafood, ducks marinated in soya sauce, a whole fish cooked with scallions and black beans”. This contrasted with his own home: “All the rooms smelled of boiled cabbage and old fat.” His mother’s cooking came out of an Ulster frying pan she never cleaned. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Nicholas has a dark, loyalist-related secret.
Lily and Nicholas conduct their romance amongst a bohemian Dublin social set, where the novel’s theme of anti-Semitism bubbles to the surface. Lily is a quarter Jewish, and on two social occasions fellow guests make blatant, lazy, anti-Semitic remarks. On the first occasion Lily leaves Nicholas to defend the Jews; on the second, she does so herself, when a terrible dinner party breaks up in racism-induced distress, with casual anti-Semitism lurking under a mask of anti-Zionism.
There is much good social observation: Lily wondered “where all the lovely Irish auburn and russet hair had gone, along with pale skin and cinnamon-coloured freckles: nearly everyone in the room looked as if they’d just returned from the Costa del Sol”.
There is plenty of luscious gastronomical writing. We read about a poached egg, “its white slightly pleated, like rumpled silk, its yolk the faultless dome of the very fresh egg”, and “carpaccio of wood pigeon; salad of duck confit and Japanese mushrooms; lobster terrine”, along with grilled hake, jumbo scallops and Persian vegetables.
Although the gastronomical writing may well be of keen interest to the gourmet reader, it occupies much space in the novel, leaving the main characters’ journey somewhat underexplored. The best writing occurs in Lily’s memories of the terrible experiences of humiliation at the hands of her mother’s rages, and it is in the probing of this trauma that the novel triumphs, with a compelling exploration of psychological fallout. In contrast, Nicholas’s past is dealt with somewhat cursorily. Sustenance, complete with a satisfying happy ending, is a high-end contemporary romance novel, delving into questions of civilisation, race and origin, with gourmet food served as an elaborate side dish.
Katy Hayes is a novelist, columnist and playwright
