SOURCE: "Food for Thought," in Book World—The Washington Post, Vol. XXVI, No. 21, May 26, 1996, p. 5.

[In the review below, Derbyshire praises The Debt to Pleasure, calling it "original as well as witty and brilliant."]

The veil and the mask; the blizzard of allusions; the dawning realization that our charming, erudite, terrifically cultured narrator is, in point of fact, barking mad—this territory looks familiar. John Lanchester, reading reviews of his book, is going to get mighty sick of the adjective "Nabokovian."

It would be an injustice to him to make too much of these echoes. The Debt to Pleasure is original as well as witty and brilliant, and the voice we hear—this is a first-person narrative—has a self-assurance and ruthlessness never attained by the old Slav illusionist's haunted exiles. On internal evidence, there seems to have been some drinking from common wells (Proust, Conan, Doyle); but...