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Gourmet Pastiche
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11428 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
1,472 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
HOTEL PASTIS
A Novel of Provence
Peter Mayle
New York: Knopf, 1993
416 pp., $23.00
Readers need a warning about Hotel Pastis. This is no ordinary first novel. Fans of Peter Mayle's two best-selling nonfictional accounts of his sojourns in southern France will likely place it on the charts of what everyone seems to be reading; yet it is a novel that the unwary reader, perhaps curious about the success of A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence, may well find at best pleasantly superficial and at worst an irritating waste of time.
Hotel Pastis is, in truth, less a novel than a potpourri of pieces from the travel, style, and food sections of a Sunday newspaper blended in a thin fictional broth. Characters and plot are no more important than the descriptions of scenery, clothes (elegant and tacky), and gourmet meals that fill the book's pages. Readers seeking either a study of middle-age burnout or a suspenseful thriller will likely be deeply disappointed.
The surface of Hotel Pastis is easily described. Simon Shaw, forty-two and just divorced, takes a rare vacation in the south of France to escape the strains of the prospering London advertising agency he heads. In Provence he meets a gorgeous and chic divorcee from Paris, Nicole Bouvier, who interests him in buying the abandoned local gendarmerie and turning it into a small but posh hotel. Enchanted by Nicole and by the stunning view from the spacious old building (which a previous owner had gone bankrupt trying to convert), Simon makes the purchase, withdraws from the lucrative London advertising rat race, and settles in to spend the winter preparing the place for a gala June opening.
Planning a quite different sort of grand opening in June are several local ex-cons, who want to escape their mundane lives by blasting through the floor of the bank's safe-deposit room, loading up on valuables, and blowing out the bank's rear door to escape the stunned police by riding bicycles through the holiday crowds. In preparation for this event, the middle-aged crooks must spend their winter getting in shape to pass as a cycling team. Obviously, the paths of Shaw and the robbers will cross at some point.
Neither fish nor fowl
...
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