Konstantin Duhovny at age ten does that terrible thing so many kids do, shouting some epithet at a parent in a fit of anger. Most kids get a chance to take it back, apologize, and atone. Not Kostya. As his father heads out the door to work without taking time to play a favorite game with him, Kostya thunderously tells him to go to the devil. It would be the last thing his dad would ever hear him say. Days, months, and years later, Kostya keeps telling himself his dad knew he hadn’t meant it, but the pain will keep lancing him “like a barb” all the days of his life.
How does any child overcome the guilt of those stinging last words? At what price will closure come, if ever it does?
Ukrainian-born author Daria Lavelle captures this haunting event in memorable and moving prose. A “dark comedy about food, ghosts, and the New York culinary scene,” Aftertaste will be published in May 2025 by Simon & Schuster. It's epic, vivid, memorable, fast-paced, and haunting.
Lavelle brings to life the hardships and personalities of this Ukrainian immigrant family. Somehow, along with all the gritty realism, Lavelle injects fantasy and magic, and we buy it.
The magic begins with Kostya at a swimming pool, suddenly tasting and feeling, in his mouth, the chicken liver with onions his mother used to cook for his father. Pechonka, Dad's favorite dish. The ghost of that dish, not its taste but its aftertaste, had been “spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again.”
Weeks later, it happened again. And again. Aftertastes appeared like messages in his mouth. Different foods each time. Foreign. The ghosts sending him these messages won't leave him alone. When he tells his mother, she sends Kostya to the white-coats. He learns how not to swallow the pills, how to tell the doctors what they want to hear, how to lie his way out of the psychiatric ward.
He will not learn how to keep the ghosts from visiting him. On the bright side, they seem harmless, “mild mannered, even sentimental.”
Kostya “hallucinates” an amazing variety of exotic dishes, and he somehow knows exactly what’s in them. Walking in Times Square, stuck in traffic with his delivery job, any time, any place, he may get a fleeting aftertaste. Pork dumpling, hint of chive, hoisin, and rice vinegar, kick of spicy mustard.
He’s about the same age as Jesus when Kostya pulls off his first miracle. A difficult patron, drunk at the bar, asks for a drink at closing time. Kostya has no training as a bartender or a chef, but when the Aftertaste strikes, he mixes up the cocktail that will summon the lost loved one of this drunken patron. He even witnesses a dialogue between the man and his dead wife, who has materialized “in a million pinpricks of light,” illuminated in green. This stranger gets the closure Kostya has never gotten with his father.
So begins Kostya's fame as a chef who summons the dead. Will good fortune be paired with the fame?
The story line shifts into the fast lane, faster and ever faster, with mishaps and setbacks, as Kostya with his new cooking talent opens a portal. The bereft can eat the food their lost loved one craves, and they get to have one more conversation. We get pages and pages of description as he tracks down the exact ingredients to recreate extraordinary dinners and cheap comfort foods.
How does Kostya find the right ingredients to cook each dish? Mom's cooking, even if it wasn't good, is often what we miss most. Comfort food, familiar food. Some of it's easy, but he’d never summon my grandpa’s garden tomatoes or beef from the cow Grandmpa raised and butchered--but!--never mind the many slow-grown, slow-cooked foods we know to be unrepeatable. The premise is fantastical, but grant the storyteller some artistic license, and the fun begins.
It’s fun at first, anyway. Sumptuous dishes are served, and lovely prose, with feel-good insights such as this:
– Kitchens were private places, where alchemy occurred, where sausage was made, where, once in a while, the divine was summoned and baked into a pie.
– A recipe could tell you who someone had been, what they had loved, the things that had sustained them. It was a way for others to carry them along, to bring them back, to keep them close once they had gone. A way to never really die.
– Food could do that. It could tell stories … Leaving behind a recipe as a way to be remembered and savored and loved even after you were gone. A way to live forever.
– What they make is fleeting–edible raptures that last only as long as it takes to consume them. But the recollection, the conversations about these morsels, the sweet nostalgia of the best things their clientele have ever eaten–those last forever.
It isn’t just good food that one might crave. The reasons for a food’s greatness “were as personal as a fingerprint.” What we eat doesn’t matter nearly as much has why. Some of us may form an attachment to food that is actually awful. Raman noodles can take us back to our college days. Ketchup and crackers your penniless mother smuggled from a restaurant might trigger the inextricable food link between the living and the dead. “But that was the thing about food you ate when you had nothing: the smallest things–warmth, crunch, calories, someone making it for you, taking care of you even if only in some small way, or making it yourself, proving that you could survive even when the world didn’t want you to–could make it the best thing you ever ate.”
The New York culinary scene with all its famed chefs may not have a clue what “comfort food” means, but Kostya does. His father “had been amazed by American eateries, by pizza parlors and diners and hamburger joints, by the idea, the thrill of it, a place you could sit and eat and still afford to pay rent after, where the food was good and fast and cheap, a holy trinity. This…is truly American. Everyone equal in pizzeria.”
source: Kathy in CT - Facebook marketplace
Kostya meets the woman of his dreams, a medium named Maura, who eventually lets him down. Kostya's near-cliche of a mother may be a real piece of work, a woman who’d trade food stamps for cigarettes in Kostya’s hungry childhood, a woman whose phone calls he usually ignores, but she has some memorable moments in the book. I love her advice (with the Ukrainian accent):
“Sometimes the people you love hurt you. Sometimes they mean to. And sometimes they don’t mean, but cannot help. It is you who must decide to keep loving them anyway.”
Love your awful mother. Forgive your scheming girlfriend. Or not.
The plot thickens, terrible things happen, increasing numbers of “hangry” ghosts get out of control, and readers wanna know: Will Kostya make the ultimate sacrifice to restore order to the world of the living?
The answer surprised me.
No spoilers here. Let’s just say I love Kostya and even his awful mother, but I never liked Maura or her dead sister. That’s purely personal, so my opinions are irrelevant.
If you love expensive restaurants and gourmet chefs (I do not), this is your kind of novel. Me, I was skimming or speed-reading the recipes to get through what could have been a tedious slog.
The concept of foods we associate with our family and friends, and with certain places and phases in our lives: fantastic! Bravo! I love the way Lavelle brings it all to life. I really love the idea of favorite foods and unrepeatable culinary experiences. Never again will I taste a cherry pie by sister Lori, who rolled out her own crusts with lard and baked cherries from her own tree. Kostya, could you really duplicate that? Of course not. But this is a novel, and I jumped in for the ride.
Richly drawn characters, memorable, and endearing, caught up in a fast-paced plot that spins out of control and into the realm of fantasy, make this a worthy debut novel.
BUT.
Would I recommend it to ?
The food parts, sure, and the New York culinary scene, for sure, but the overall story, with its tragic vibe, and a certain lack of closure for Kostya, made me think we may need to consume lighter fare.
Thank you Net Galley and Simon & Schuster for this Advance Reader Copy.