LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND

Man Booker winner Pierre (Ludmila’s Broken English, 2006, etc.) continues on his polarizing way with another extreme adventure, this one undertaken by a narrator who plans to kill himself.

Readers may not feel too terrible about that, since Gabriel, like Pierre’s protagonist in Vernon God Little (2002), is initially as obnoxious as he is motor-mouthed. Just checked into rehab by his father, Gabriel puffs defiantly on cigarettes while ranting about capitalism and messing with the staff. Soon he slips away for a final pre-suicide bacchanal with his best friend Smuts, who’s working at an ultra-exclusive Tokyo restaurant that serves poisonous (and illegal) fugu to those who can afford it. Unfortunately, once Gabriel gets done loading him up with coke and booze, Smuts recklessly takes the challenge of a customer who wants the fish’s extra-toxic liver. The customer winds up in the hospital, and Smuts in jail. The only way Gabriel can spring him is by getting Smuts’ shadowy “sponsor,” Didier Le Basque, to pull strings. And the only way to do that is to convince Didier, who makes a fortune creating one-of-a-kind banquets for rich thrill-seekers, that Gabriel can connect him to a unique venue. So off Gabriel goes to Berlin, where his detested father had a club in the 1990s. Things get even crazier when Gabriel actually does discover the perfect spot for a decadent feast: miles of tunnels and bunkers built for the Third Reich underneath Tempelhof Airport. Even as he enthusiastically participates in the excesses of Didier’s right-hand man Thomas, who’s arranging the bash in the bunkers, Gabriel is developing a guilty conscience about the whole affair. Can it be that our hero is growing up? Well, yes: Gabriel eventually drops his intended suicide, along with several other affectations of youth, though Pierre does feel obliged to provide an over-the-top finale involving fireworks both gastronomic and incendiary.

Considerably more mature than its predecessors, and just as scathingly brilliant with words, but this author is definitely an acquired taste.