THE LEMON, by S.E. Boyd
Many fiction writers lament the solitary nature of their work, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. “The Lemon” marks the arrival of S.E. Boyd, a pseudonym cooked up by its three authors, the journalists Kevin Alexander and Joe Keohane, and the editor Alessandra Lusardi. Drawing on Alexander’s background reporting on the hospitality industry, and tapping into a fascination with chefs’ lives that has only been stoked by the TV drama “The Bear,” this poised and playful debut novel is a sly satire on foodie culture and the modern hype machine.
It opens with the death of John Doe, an Anthony Bourdain-esque media personality, in compromising circumstances. Charlie McCree, a hung-over bellhop in the Belfast hotel where Doe’s staying, blunders onto the scene and advises Doe’s shellshocked best friend, the chef Paolo Cabrini, to preserve the poor man’s dignity by pulling up his trousers and removing the lemon slice from his mouth. While Paolo’s doing the honors, Charlie takes a photo.
Unfolding over nine months, the novel follows the efforts of Doe’s agent, Nia Greene, to control the narrative — by passing Doe’s death off as suicide and containing the threat posed by Charlie, who shows up in New York and invites himself to stay with Paolo. The web of lies is further tangled by the millennial-in-crisis Katie Horatio, a clickbait writer whose fabricated account of Doe’s kindness to her goes viral, transforming their alleged lunch spot, an unassuming Georgian restaurant in Queens, into a pilgrimage site. As the vultures circle Doe’s carcass, staking whatever claims they can, those closest to him must battle opportunism in various guises to protect his legacy and secure their own interests.
The chapters are told from different characters’ third-person perspectives, in agile sentences ripe with metaphor and peppered with snappy dialogue. In the mix are the washed-up chef Patrick Whelan, a 1990s enfant terrible whose “gyoza-style shepherd’s pie … horrified his Irish mother but set the culinary world ablaze”; Katie, who embodies the crushed dreams and prolific anxieties of the generation that came of age with the internet; Lad, the baffled Georgian restaurant owner; and the slippery con man Charlie. Knowledge is power, and characters repeatedly get ahead not through merit, but through blackmail.
The ensuing caper plays out in hotels, bars and restaurants, while skewering these venues’ pageantry and pretensions. Doe’s hotel in Belfast, bandit — “intentionally lowercase” — offers tourists “an authentic Belfast experience … at a safe remove.” Paolo’s brainchild, The French Restaurant With the French Name, is a much-fetishized fine-dining mecca where guests’ egos are massaged by the exclusivity of the “speakeasy.” Likewise, the story pulls no punches in its scathing portrayal of the dying digital media company where Katie works, which is “like an exhausted peddler going from town to town with a trunk of random objects.”
Satire this taut and funny is hard to sustain without spiraling too far into absurdity. Boyd stays in control, but the novel’s jaunty pace and exuberant plot can’t hide its hard kernel of cynicism — there’s something inescapably bleak about all these people desperately tethering their futures to a corpse. Of course, you could argue it’s only as cynical as the culture it lampoons, one that milks everything for cash, from Belfast’s bloody history to a man’s premature demise.
As tart as “artisanal citrus,” as sharp as a chef’s knife, “The Lemon” is both a gleeful foodie sendup in the tradition of Simon Wroe’s “Chop Chop” and Chelsea G. Summers’s “A Certain Hunger,” and an incisive takedown of the commercial exploitation of just about everything, even death.
Madeleine Feeny’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, The Spectator and other publications.
THE LEMON | By S.E. Boyd | 282 pp. | Viking | $27
