Last time we were visiting, my wife’s mom passed along Peter Mayle’s latest book, A Good Year. “You’ll read this in a couple of days, and it will make you want to drink wine and eat cheese while you're doing it,” she assured me. She was almost right – I read it in a couple of evenings and it made me want to drink wine. The cheese? The southern French dishes described in the novel were so tantalizing and so unattainable that I was not made hungry, but instead left with a sort of wistful food ennui.
The plot is typical of Mayle’s fiction: silly, fun and full of excuses to render lavish descriptions of food, drink and lovely French women and landscapes. A London businessman, Max Skinner, is in debt and hoping for a big commission on a deal he’s about to close for the high pressure, cutthroat financial firm he works at. Instead he loses his job. Coincidentally he discovers he has inherited an estate and winery in the South of France from his long unseen uncle; a place he used to stay as a child. A friend, who has (coincidentally, again) just gotten a big promotion, loans Max money for the trip and extended stay in France, and Max sets out to see if he can make a go of it as a vintner. Nothing’s simple, though. The wine is awful, there’s something suspicious about the man who tends the grapes, the woman who runs the local café is beautiful and interested, and to top it off, a lovely American shows up claiming to be the deceased uncle’s long lost daughter. Which means, according to French law, she may well have a better claim to the estate than Max. Hijinks and drinking ensue.
As I finished the book and browsed through the list of his other novels and travel books in the back, I realized how many of them I’ve read, and how many years that reading represents, since I only allow myself one of these a year.
Why only one Peter Mayle book a year? Glad you asked:
1. My liver couldn’t take more.
2. They might cause the equivalent of literary cavities, or at least tooth decay… (which is not to say Mayle doesn't turn sumptuous phrases, and his eye for places, people and textures is dazzling clear ... it's just that the plots and characters are, well, "breezy.")
3. My wife will not concede to move the kids to Europe anytime soon.
A votre sant!
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