EATING CROW

Food critic with one kill to his name is thrown into remorse and ends up as the world’s official conscience—in an occasionally amusing debut by the restaurant critic for the London Observer .

When a despondent chef kills himself by climbing into an large bread oven, he tapes to its door Marc Basset’s review stating that said chef’s food was so bad he deserved to be on death row. This sends Basset into a spiral of soul-searching, after which he decides that he will no longer write negative reviews. Given that the rotund gourmand, compensating with food and vitriol for a mostly unhappy childhood and unlucky love life, is especially known for his poison pen, this leaves his editor with little choice but to give him the boot. During Basset’s time of self-flagellation, he comes to the conclusion that he needs to apologize to everyone he had wronged in his past, a quest that culminates when he tracks down the woman to whom he lost his virginity in college so that he can apologize for boasting about it to his pals later. Not thinking too much about how odd it is that she wants to videotape his confession, the unemployed Basset finds his teary visage being e-mailed around the world; people can’t get enough of how dramatically contrite he is. One twist of fate later, he has been named Chief Apologist for the United Nations. First major assignment: apologize officially to the African-American community for slavery. It should be a devastatingly funny, but Rayner is unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, much more comfortable with food (the scenes of Basset cooking are simply unfair they’re so mouthwatering) than with geopolitical satire.

This British newcomer deserves praise for not hewing to a more simple black-comic narrative, but like Basset, he flies too high, too fast and gets burned for his efforts.