The most interesting thing, and ultimately the winning thing, about Ms. Hugo Whittier, in Kate Christensen's 2004 novel, "The Epicure's Lament," thought of little other than food, cigarettes, sex and his smoldering misanthropy. The pleasures of the body are now omnipresent in literature. The first scene in "The Sun Also Rises" takes place just after dinner. We meet Leopold Bloom in "Ulysses" at breakfast, and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" over drinks. Eating-like sex-became a key element in the Modernist quest for verisimilitude. "It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings," she wrote, "as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine." Clearly much has changed since her time, when quite a bit was considered improper for high-minded prose. In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf noted that novelists tended to depict luncheon parties by recounting what was wittily said or wisely done, not what was eaten.
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