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Roger Williams Lunch with Elizabeth David: A Novel
Carroll & Graf Publishers 0786707070 / 9780786707072 Hardcover Very Good
0786707070 Editorial Reviews n nAmazon.com Review nA delightfully inventive ragout of fiction and historical fact, Roger Williams's first novel revolves around a pair of 20th-century icons. There is Norman Douglas, the erudite charmer, gourmet, scoffer, quaffer, and high-spirited pederast, best known as the author of South Wind. And there is Elizabeth David, who transformed Britain's humdrum eating habits in 1950 with the publication of Mediterranean Food. A homage to both of these glorious hedonists, Lunch with Elizabeth David comes in two parts, divided roughly along his-and-hers lines. n nThe first section details the unsentimental education--classical, culinary, sexual--of one Eric Wolton, a working-class Londoner celebrating his 13th birthday in Naples in 1911. This fictional figure is promptly "ravished by Norman Douglas the length and breadth of Calabria." Man and boy take their pleasures lightly indeed as they voyage across Italy's boot (which Douglas went on to celebrate in Old Calabria). And in later years, Eric, now resigned to a dull policeman's existence, recalls that summer as "the best time in his life." In 1951, however, he is abruptly summoned to the island of Capri, where Douglas and his fashionable entourage--including Harold Acton, Graham Greene, and Gracie Fields--are joining Elizabeth David for a farewell lunch. n nIn the novel's second part, Williams veers more decisively in the direction of fiction. The scenario goes like this: In the late winter of 1946, Cherry Ingram's mother had waited upon Elizabeth David in a hotel in Ross-on-Wye. (In the novel she is alone; in reality, she was there with a lover, and famously described the food as "produced with a kind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity's needs.") Cut to the late 1980s, which find Cherry delivering a whitefish to a "Mrs. David"--bibulous, overbearing, and suspicious of the finny creature's provenance. This chance encounter leads Cherry into her own past, which turns out to dovetail not only with David's but with that of Norman Douglas and his young paramour. n nWilliams's novel wonderfully evokes the glories of the Mediterranean, not to mention its multiple pleasures. It is perhaps less successful at splicing Eric and Cherry into the historical canvas: the drama of their lives inevitably pales beside Douglas's high-cholesterol existence, or David's. That said, the good parts are truly delicious and well worth sampling. --Ruthie Petrie n nFrom Publishers Weekly nBritish cookbook legend Elizabeth David and bon vivant writer Norman Douglas crossed paths in Antibes in 1940. In Williams's colorful American debut, the worldly playboy Douglas's impact on the yet unknown Englishwoman takes a back seat to Douglas's escapades in Naples and beyond. A compelling, often ribald account covering a 30-year time span shows Douglas indulging in his penchant for young boys--his "nephews"--and in particular his erotic mentorship/friendship with Eric Wolton, a working-class, 12-year-old British lad whose life is radically transformed when he is taken under Douglas's wing in 1910 and brought to Italy. Williams so entertainingly depicts Eric's coming-of-age under Douglas's tutelage--delicately handling the boy's innocent sexual explorations with his mentor and enlivening their culinary and educational experiences with lavish descriptions--that the eventual entrance of Elizabeth David (n?e Miss Gwynne) into the narrative is anticlimactic. Part Two of the novel jumps ahead to 1985 and, again, glimpses of David are marginal as the tale revolves around the relationship between John Dorelli, implied to be the grandson of Norman Douglas, and Dorelli's British wife, Cherry Ingram. Cherry is the proprietor of a catering business and she has a brief, intense encounter with the aged Elizabeth David. Douglas and David enjoy two vibrant lunch scenes, one in 1940, in which they discuss herbs in a French countryside as German troops encroach, the other in 1951, when they meet among friends and luminaries such as Graham Greene an
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