A Really Big Lunch

February 6, 2017
The late poet and novelist Harrison (Legends of the Fall), known for sagas of frontier existentialists, was also a devotee of fine and not-so-fine dining, and his gusto sparkles throughout this collection of magazine essays on food. Harrison writes of a vast range of meals and foodstuffs in disparate settings: fresh-caught rattlesnakes; a dinner of “artisanal salamis, lamb and duck prosciutto” flown in for a fishing trip; innumerable sojourns through France eating at bistros and ogling women; the title feast, an 11-hour, 37-course, 19-wine lunch featuring three centuries of French delicacies including poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. Woven around the food descriptions (complete with a recipe for bear-meat cubes) are the author’s rambling ruminations and poems on just about everything, including the similarities of wine criticism and literary criticism, Wall Street’s odiousness, Buddhist moral lacunae, and death and dying. As his aging body succumbs to diabetes, shingles, kidney stones, and other afflictions, food becomes a last redoubt of sensual pleasure amid waning physicality. Harrison treats all these subjects with his usual earthy wit and delighted curiosity; the result is a tasty nosh for foodies with a literary bent.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life.This posthumous collection of food pieces (very broadly defined) by the award-winning novelist serves as a sequel of sorts to The Raw and the Cooked (2001), which documented his insatiable hunger for food, from the mundane to the exotic to the exquisite, and so much more. The linchpin of a collection that holds together surprisingly well is the title piece that he wrote for the New Yorker in 2004, an essay that scandalized some readers in its embrace of excess. "Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it?" he wonders. "Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, 'Supersize me!' " Some of the other essays also reference this piece, in its vivid description of its 37 courses, along with his ironic complaint that only 19 wines accompanied it. He later writes, "I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I'd get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhone. Maybe I'd swim all the way downstream to Arles for my last supper." In the latter half of the collection, Harrison proceeds through just the kind of extended warning that the author had suggested, with the thoughts on the way he has lived his life underscored by the ravages he is experiencing. Along the way, the author waxes wickedly funny over matters of art, politics, spirituality, sex, and the commingling of all of them. His advice: "Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it." If this is the last we get from Harrison, it serves as a fitting memorial.

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March 15, 2017
Poet and novelist Harrison's food writing was previously collected in The Raw and the Cooked (2001), and most of the nearly 50 pieces gathered in this new collection, published on the one-year anniversary of the author's death, were written since then. First appearing in Brick, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, and other publications, the mostly short essays share a stream-of-consciousness, unedited, uncensored approach and touch on travel, politics, literature, art, sex, writing, and the author's health nearly as much as they do food. And on all of the above, his playful quotability is boundless: tofu is a gustatory self-laceration, drinking is the writer's black lung disease, and if you shared a bottle of Cayron before the usual obnoxious meeting you wouldn't hate anyone. Battling painful illness, he writes, Of course we are loaned this life, then suddenly one day it's overdue. With an introduction from Harrison's longtime friend Mario Batali, this makes a great addition to popular food and wine collections and will be a savory treat for Harrison fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)