Winot, we quickly realise, is a wildly undependable narrator. As he writes, he is on a journey from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his house in Provence. We hear of his parents' demise in an accident involving an exploding gas canister, of a Norwegian cook's falling under a tube train, of his brother's death from poisoning ' all these misfortunes occurring in his immediate vicinity. On his journey through France he is shadowing a honeymoon couple, the female half of which, we discover, is Laura Tavistock who, it transpires, is writing a biography of Tarquin's late brother, Barry, a world-famous sculptor whose work is dismissed as tiresomely vulgar trash. Finally, in Provence, Tarquin manoeuvres himself into an 'accidental' meeting with the honeymooners, and invites them to his house for dinner, to stay the night, and to partake at breakfast of a wild-mushroom omelette. . .
Style is all.
Tarquin speaks of soups like works of art 'in which a filigreed delicacy of local detail adds up to an agglomerated solidity of effect'. That phrase, 'agglomerated solidity', is particularly apt to Tarquin's own achievement. As do almost all of Nabokov's first-person narrators, artists manques to a man, Tarquin pirouettes before us, gaudy as a firebird, unaware that all the time his poor, blackened heart is on his sleeve for all to see. I do not wish to give the impression that The Debt to Pleasure is merely derivative ' it is derivative, but it is also, as Nabokov himself would say, much, much more. It is, for example, coruscatingly, horribly funny.