I’ve known guys like Hugo–masters of self-loathing, crazed spinners of phrase, “attuned to that same deviant, anything goes frequency,” so dazzling you want to kiss their words. But this novel was written by a woman. Kate Christensen’s Hugo, with his talent for duplicity and the daily inhumanity, descends from a long line of cad lit–the perverser he gets, the more delicious it seems. But will he actually commit suicide? Whittier’s literary touchstones tip us off: why does he persist in mastering the self-referential 16th-century political essayist Michel de Montaigne, in French? And what of his “brutal, half-hateful crush” on the food writer M.F.K. Fisher (“that uppity little slyboots of a voluptuary autodidact”), whose husband suffered Hugo’s own rare disease, and whose redemptive phrase “Serve with plenty of hot buttered toast” he repeatedly whispers? That phrase, he/she writes, “gives the disaffected and ill-at-ease–me, for example–a momentary welling of joy.” Which pretty much nails the feeling you get from “The Epicure’s Lament.”
