August 13, 2000

By JULIE GRAY

LUNCH WITH ELIZABETH DAVID By Roger Williams. Carroll & Graf, $24.95.

eaders sit down to two splendid lunches with Elizabeth David, the late English food writer, in the course of this historical novel that ranges from a bonfire at London's Crystal Palace on Guy Fawkes Day in 1910 to the Cte d'Azur at the outbreak of World War II to a large Italian family gathering for lunch in the coastal resort of Eastbourne, England, in 1985. In his first novel, the English journalist and travel writer Roger Williams manages to link all these events and the connections, though tenuous in some cases, never feel strained. While David's spirit suffuses the novel, she appears only fleetingly; another historical figure plays the leading role. He is Norman Douglas, the expatriate English novelist, essayist and travel writer who died in Capri in 1952 and was a close friend of David's. Douglas taught David many things about food and life; he inscribed a copy of one of his books to her: ''Always do as you please and send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences.'' In Douglas's case, doing as he pleased meant dalliances with young boys, and the consequences included a brief stay in jail. Much of this absorbing novel is told from the point of view of one of Douglas's many ''nephews,'' Eric Wolton, a boy who is only 12 years old when Douglas plucks him from a dreary working-class life to be his companion as he journeys through Calabria. The question at the novel's center concerns Douglas: Is he, as one character puts it, ''a monster, the pedophile of the century,'' or is he, as Eric says, a great man who had led him into a ''warm and sensuous world of adventures and light''? Williams is as occupied with evoking the sunny Mediterranean world, fragrant with rosemary and olive oil, as with weighing moral questions, however, and the novel's second half, set in London in the 1980's and 90's, is told largely from the point of view of a young female caterer who reveres David; this gives the author even more occasion for savory prose in this delightful, meaty novel.

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