A Taste of European Intrigue and Food

Here’s why you read Peter Mayle: A description of a meal at Lucas-Carton in Paris includes “Camembert with Calvados, Epoisses with Marc de Borgogne, Vieux Brebis with Manzanilla.” You might read him to share the anticipation of a shower and a kir in a beautiful hotel at the end of a day, or to discover “Cap Ferrat, elegantly wooded with palm and pine trees.” In sum, you read him for a fleeting feeling of familiarity with Europe and with money (usually someone else’s or the expense account variety).

Here’s why you don’t read him: Phrases like “What a beautiful country England would be if someone turned off the water,” or “Lucy’s giggle came across 3,000 miles.” Reading a book, after all, is still slightly different from paging through Town and Country. On the other hand, paging through Town and Country can be a very pleasant experience--sitting in your grubby old armchair in your dusty old American city--so why not prolong it to book length? You can probably put off the “Anatomy of Melancholy” for another season.

Andre Kelly is a 31-year-old photographer who lives in Manhattan and whose main meal ticket is the glossy, glitzy magazine, Decorating Quarterly, DQ. Andre is kind of lonely in spite of great midwinter assignments that take him to Cap Ferrat and the Bahamas and Paris. His sights are fixed on Lucy, his agent, who is everything you’d want a woman to be, including nice.

Camilla, the editor of DQ, is Tina Brown without the brain, now a familiar character: the trendy magazine editor who spends far too much money (the publisher’s, of course) on Armani suits and limousines, and, in the case of this novel, lunch at the Royalton. Now you know that by the time a New York restaurant appears in a Peter Mayle novel its time has passed by about three years, and the middle-aged advertising executives who might once have gone there have been replaced by Republicans and visitors from Trenton, N.J. (who are probably more interesting to look at). A main character in the novel, it would be more interesting to see Camilla, who runs around in a cloud of fawning assistants, after the fall, when her publisher finally focuses on her expense accounts . . . but that’s another novel.

Camilla sleeps with Holtz, a disgusting toad of an art dealer who is also rich. Holtz is in the habit of shepherding shady deals whereby paintings are forged by various Dutchmen and sold by their wealthy owners on the sly, without all those nasty duties and taxes and paperwork. One such deal involves a painting by Cezanne, owned by a Mr. Denoyer, whom Andre knows from photographing his house and flirting with his daughter. When Andre, passing through Cap Ferrat (what a world!), sees the Cezanne being loaded into a plumber’s van, his seemingly meaningless existence is given a focus.

He enlists Cyrus Pine, an honest, elderly Manhattan art dealer (houndstooth and bow ties) and Lucy in his quest to uncover nefarious intentions for the $30-million painting. The rest is a zany, madcap flurry of plane tickets and flirtations and glittering details, which, like the cheeses, are the most fun in a book by Peter Mayle, who left the advertising world years ago to write about the people he once worked with. It’s nice to see that the years have brought some distance from these people, and he must feel good about it, too, since his satire is a bit sharper and his good characters are actually likable.

“Chasing Cezanne” is one part spoof and one part Keystone Kops and one part “A Year in Provence.” It’s not quite beach reading; it’s hammock reading, which, with the right vintage in hand, has a semblance of respectability on a hot summer day.