SOURCE: "Dishes to Die for," in New Statesman & Society, March 15, 1996, p. 33.

[In the following review, Jakeman argues that The Debt to Pleasure lacks suspense and suffers from too little attention to detail.]

"Who am I? Who are you? And what the fuck's going on?" The reader of John Lanchester's foodie thriller [The Debt to Pleasure] will inevitably sympathize with the narrator's artist brother, Bartholomew. Hamlet-like, he poses these crucial questions while embedded in a mesh of upmarket gourmandise. Lanchester was the restaurant critic of the Observer, so he has the foodie world at his fingertips in the John Lanchester

Tarquin is a full-blow product of the European great tradition—in food as in literature. He liberally scatters his story with rib-nudging cultural references (hypocrite lecteur), whereas Bartholomew represents the untamed, uncivilized, tomato-sauce-loving force...