A FINE TASTE FOR MURDER : THE DEBT TO PLEASURE,<i> By John Lanchester (Henry Holt: $20; 251 pp.)</i>

When Tarquin Winot was a child, his graceful and beautiful mother took him, dressed in his sailor suit, to dine at La Coupole, Paris’ once-resplendent brasserie. Someday he would accomplish great things, she told him.

The assurance of glory, a dazzling mother who promised it and sublime food were the child’s peek into a paradise never to be forgotten--and never regained. As it turned out, it was not Tarquin whom the whole treacherous world, including his mother, would recognize as a genius, but his little brother Bartholomew, who grew up to be a celebrated painter and sculptor.

Accordingly, Tarquin grew up to be the anti-Bartholomew, the anti-artist, a lucid particle of anti-matter. His exquisitely nurtured mission was to assert his own anti-universe and cause the real one, at strategic junctures, to go “poof!”

John Lanchester, a British literary editor and food critic, has done Cain and Abel as elaborate parody. In blatantly unreliable tones--urbane wit punctuated by howls--Tarquin begins his memoir as a spoof of highbrow cookbook writing. This leads, in a pastiche of Proust’s celebrated madeleine, to a series of variations on food and memory. Gradually another story emerges: Tarquin’s comically far-fetched--and far too discursive--tale of a revengeful chase through the French landscape. It is a second pastiche: this one of Humbert Humbert’s wordy pursuit of Lolita, Quilty and his own delusions through the American landscape.

“The Debt to Pleasure” begins as Tarquin is about to undertake what purports to be a gastronomic tour of France, in the course of which he will keep a day-by-day diary. His admirers (they will turn out to be imaginary) have persuaded him to do so, he tells us, even though food is merely an avocation--”a shaving from the master’s workbench”--and not his real art.

His real art, in contrast to his sculptor brother’s vulgar production of objects, consists in imagining things and not producing them. Not creative passion but creative dislike is the highest aesthetic force, he argues: Passion puts you at the mercy of reality, dislike keeps you free.

Tarquin’s art, therefore, is not to create things but to make them disappear. Bit by bit, as he spins out theories and tendentious recollections, sets out seasonal menus, discusses the difference between stews that require sauteing and those that don’t, he drops hints of how this actually works.

His first artistic act, as a child, was to smash a papier-ma^che elephant his brother had made. His second was to frame his nanny over a missing bit of jewelry so that she would be fired before she could tell on him. She kills herself, and over the years various others--a cook, a tutor, Tarquin’s parents and eventually his brother--die in odd assorted ways. The deaths are divulged casually, minor details in the course of Tarquin’s ebullient menu writing, philosophizing and peculiarly suspect food-and-travel journal.

Lanchester provides considerable wit along the way, particularly in the gradual undermining of his narrator’s urbane tone and his expansive certainty that the world will eventually recognize him as the real genius of his family. He assumes, right up to the denouement, that an attractive young writer who comes to interview him is engaged on his, not Bartholomew’s, biography. He also assumes that she is secretly smitten with him.

Tarquin divides his journal with an ideal menu for each of the four seasons. He goes on to discuss the preparation and significance of the particular dishes and drifts from these to updates on the journey, which begins in Normandy, continues to Brittany and then turns southward, ending at his lavish summer home in Provence.

The food writing starts off with conviction and panache. Tarquin gives a lively step-by-step account of how to layer an Irish stew. He discusses the details of fish soups and stews around the world, noting that the English, great fish-eaters, lack a proper version of their own; even the Scots have something called cullen skink.

But then there is an odd droop and trailing off. For curries, he impatiently advises consulting a book. As for lemon tart, the reader is told to go buy one. It is not creation, we remember, that is Tarquin’s art, but disappearance; and by the time he reaches his home in Provence, he is writing of poisonous mushrooms and omelets.

As for the trip itself, it undergoes its own undermining. At first it is all food and reminiscence; there is a nice bit about restaurants as the setting for the big emotional transactions of our lives: seductions, ruptures, life-changing proposals.

Abruptly and without comment he ducks into a shop to avoid meeting someone. He begins to refer to his trip with “we” instead of “I.” Citing a manual of surveillance, he changes his rental car each day. Before long he lets us glimpse a young couple he is trailing; a little later he has broken into their hotel bedroom to bug it and attached a directional radio device to the undercarriage of their car. We are on our way to Provence and a concluding work of art.

“The Debt to Pleasure” is elegantly written. Lanchester describes Tarquin’s aristocratic mother giving politely disdainful orders to the mouth-breathing Irish nanny, who receives them with the “faintest bat squeak of mimed reluctance.” Illustrating the need to follow recipes precisely, Tarquin speaks of a pheasant emerging from the oven “terrible in its sarcophagus of feathers” when the cook failed to notice the word “pluck.”

The gradual infusion of poisonous hatred into Tarquin’s debonair narration is accomplished with skill and polish. It loses its suspense before long, though; the character, unlike Nabokov’s Humbert, is a vessel of surprises, not mysteries. Tarquin is flat, and on a flat landscape the destination comes into sight miles in advance.

The book begins with a reference to Brillat-Savarin, the larger-than-life French chef and exponent of the theory of limitless gastronomic pleasure. He was a man so exhausting that his sisters took to their beds for three months in advance of his annual visit.

The reader may experience some of the same exhaustion in the course of Tarquin’s blithely fraudulent account. At the start, the narrator enticingly proposes a game of sorts: Guess what is really going on. By the end, his “let’s play” has turned--we’ve all been thrown in with children like that--into “watch me play.”