IN THE KITCHEN by Monica Ali (Scribner/Simon & Schuster), 438 pages, $34.99 cloth. Rating: NNN
Monica Ali has a gift for getting inside the heads of her male characters. In her debut, Brick Lane, she made a sympathetic character out of Chanu, Nazreen’s pathetic husband. And In The Kitchen’s protagonist, Gabriel Lightfoot, is another man unlikely to elicit our compassion.
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Born in a small northern town where his aging father worked all his life at the town mill, he’s now an ambitious executive chef at a major hotel in London, England, just months away from opening his own restaurant, which he hopes will catapult him to stardom.
But a death in the kitchen’s storage catacombs sets off a series of events – including an encounter with the dead man’s “roommate,” Lena – that sends Gabriel on a downward spiral of self-destruction.
The kitchen detail is delicious, and the startlingly diverse staff evokes the city’s dazzling multicultural mix. Gabriel enjoys hearing his colleagues’ personal stories, but a similar curiosity about Lena soon turns into an all-out obsession.
Throughout, Ali takes on the burning issue of immigration and exploitation – slave farm labourers, the traffic in women – focusing specifically on Eastern European victims.
But this is Gabriel’s story. He’s drawn to Lena, takes her in and, before he knows it, is abusing her like every other man in her life. In Ali’s capable hands, his actions actually make sense even as we’re appalled by them.
But the plot simmers for just that little bit too long, and there’s a point when you just want Gabriel to get whatever’s coming to him, whether it’s redemption or comeuppance.
Ali’s fans will eat it up, though. She’s still one of the UK’s most talented fiction writers.
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