Reading Aftertaste, I found myself wondering how readers visualised novels before the age of cinema. Now we all have a set of preformed mental images of things we might never have seen – or won’t ever see – in real life, from plane crashes to zombie apocalypses. Sometimes, a novel comes along with a climactic scene that’s so exact a fit for a particular movie’s aesthetic (Ghostbusters, in this case: we’re talking angry spooks! SFX! Manhattan!) that it’s practically an extension of the franchise. Daria Lavelle’s debut is an amalgamation of hypermodern satire, slushy romance and savvy cultural allusion that is as vigorously brought together as its lead character’s recipes.
Konstantin “Kostya” Duhovny has been plagued since childhood with a strange affliction. Tastes he has never experienced invade his mouth. He seems to be having other people’s food memories. But whose? A lowly restaurant dishwasher, he has a big advantage over the other kitchen serfs: pinning down these evanescent flavours has given him a huge repertoire of tastes and techniques, fast-tracking his culinary skills, and soon he is rising in New York’s haute restaurant scene.
When he recreates a cocktail he has fleetingly tasted, a ghost appears, sending Kostya in panic to a psychic, who luckily turns out to be a beautiful young woman. Goth girl Maura offers a diagnosis: what he suffers from is clairgustance, which allows him to taste the favourite foods of the departed, connecting him with the dead. As movie lore dictates, Maura and Kostya can’t link romantically just yet. Dispatching him with a baleful warning never to repeat the experiment, she disappears from the narrative – for now.
Lavelle excels in conjuring the scenes behind the swinging doors, where head chefs hassle, sous chefs hustle and sweating waitstaff barrel in and out. An episode with Kostya meandering glumly through a pretentious sea-themed pop-up nightclub is also terrific in its caustic observation of hipster types. Chapter headings uphold the culinary theme: Mise en Places, Entrée, Backburners, as well as the more intriguing Hard to Swallow and Discomfort Food. Working at Saveur Fare, an El Bulli-style gastrodome, Kostya experiments with menus in spare moments, then opens his own secret supper club, promising punters the chance of a final meeting with a departed loved one. Sometimes full materialisation ensues, sometimes it doesn’t, but a mystery investor gets wind and offers an upgrade: Kostya’s own restaurant.
Interpolated passages in italics represent the banter of an overeager tour guide to “The Konstantin Duhovny Culinary Experience” (“All right! How we doing? Getting a taste for our guy’s secret sauce?”). The moment when we twig just who is leading the tour is expertly timed. Maura and Kostya soon reconnect, but it’s strange that someone who can write so scathingly about the sillier aspects of modern life can also come up with dialogue like this: “No! Konstantin, that isn’t – that might be how it started, but it isn’t how it stayed! I fell for you. It would have been so much easier if I hadn’t.”
Hungry spirits are now jostling for attention and the veil between worlds is fraying. There has already been a sneaky reference to Ghostbusters, and sentences such as “A waiter slipped behind a thick velvet curtain, only to be driven out by a cackling ghost” suggest that Bill Murray and crew will charge through the door at any moment. But the novel is seasoned with plenty of imagination, pathos and novelty: it even updates the famous literary principle of Chekhov’s gun in foodie terms, but I won’t spoil that particular innovation. Aftertaste pulls together familiar elements of romance and the supernatural, adding a dash of Anthony Bourdain-style bullishness and a pinch of Davelle’s own authorial smarts. I’ll bet there’s a run on fleur de sel right after publication day.
• Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
