Sarah-Kate Lynch: Eating with the Angels

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

With her last book, By Bread Alone, Lynch seemed to have really cracked the genre. Bread Alone was a nicely executed tale about food, love, sex and lovely locations. The heroine lost her taste for baking sourdough bread when her love life went sour.

As formulaic fiction goes, this one had it all. Lynch has a nice and easy style; is funny without being show-offy and her characters are believable. Eating with Angels follows that formula.

Restaurant critic Connie Farrell goes on a second honeymoon to Venice — without her husband Tom who has failed to turn up. So she does what every self-respecting foodie would do: she has a mad fling with a handsome gondolier who takes her on an eating t

our of Venice and hand-feeds her delectable morsels, and quite a bit more.

Then Connie has an accident and wakes up in hospital in New York with a head injury and a memory loss. She discovers that, not only is she now the food critic for the New York Times, but that she is a total bitch who dumped her hubby and is now engaged to a total prat.

But worse, far worse, she has lost her sense of taste and smell. The coconut and lime marinated cod could be her Jewish-converted-to-Catholicism mother's cranberry omelette served with aged salami for all Connie can tell.

Any foodie who has read the memoirs of the real former

New York Times food critic, Ruth Reichl, might see quite a few similarities between the mad and dangerous cooking experiments of Lynch's fictional mother and Reichl's real maddening mother. (Lynch met Reichl in the course of researching this book.)

She does rather over-do the food metaphor. Here is Connie talking about her ghastly fiance: "the dandy who incredibly lured me away to a well-heeled life sauteed in nonsense and peppered with pretension". She has never been a "hot tamale on the dating scene". The gondolier's touch "felt warm and velvety, like Valrhona hot chocolate would if you drank it on the outside of your body". She is a restaurant reviewer, but talk about, ah, over-egging the pudding.

That Lynch, and her publishers, should want to continue with the funny foodie romance novel makes sense, but I rather wonder how many times she can pull off this particular currently fashionable fusion style.

There is also something as off as mom's cooking with the vernacular. In making her characters American and Italian, she has them all talking what is supposed to be American. Her gondolier's sexy father says "crissakes" and "goddamned". Yes, all right, there is a twist, but at this point in the novel we are supposed to believe that these characters are Italians.

Still, good on her. It is, mostly, a deftly turned tale which will sell like, well, you can guess what it will sell like ...

* Black Swan, $26.95