LIQUOR

Famed stylist Brite (Lost Souls, 1992) abandons the horror field to follow her bliss into a mainstream novel set in the food world and restaurants of her adopted home, New Orleans.

Most recently (Plastic Jesus, 2000), Brite took on John Lennon and Paul McCartney as alter egos for her heroes, but her style had none of the soaring excess that powers her best work, nor was she up to finding prose equal to the Beatles’ sublimity, as she was able for R.Crumb’s penwork and Charlie Parker’s bop sax in Drawing Blood. Exquisite Corpse was a splatterpunk stunt. Aside from descriptions of original alcohol-soaked viands, this outing finds Brite restrained to bloodlessness. Two gay cooks, Rickey and G-man, who’ve been best friends since childhood and now live together, drink together, and often work together in kitchens of varied New Orleans restaurants, aspire to open their own restaurant and present a cuisine whose every dish is laced, soaked, spiced or in some way flavored with fine liquors. The restaurant’s name: Liquor. This offers Brite some fancy moments, as in describing a tender (nonalcoholic) Gulf shrimp appetizer “spiked with tasso ham, tossed in a spicy beurre blanc, set atop a pool of five-pepper jelly, and garnished with pickled okra. The dish had a bright, complex flavor: first you tasted the sweetness of the shrimp and butter, then the gastrique’s sourness and the tart burn of the peppers.” The author brings more energy to her cooking, though, than to her plot, which turns on the two lads being backed by high-roller Lenny Duveteaux, who may have crooked reasons for backing them. One waits for a Mafia tie to rise up and add some oregano to the French cuisine. But it’s not forthcoming, and we’re left with a villain who is a cokehead chef who hates Rickey, wants to do him in, but fails in villainous brilliance.

Showy, but seldom the great Balzac Ian roars of kitchen hell.