Tedious. It's rare that I speed through a book solely for the purpose of getting to the end of it so I can throw it down and get to a better book, but this was certainly the case with "Lunch". This formula has been done before, more engagingly and intricately, by better writers. The author's attempt at provocation fails miserably and the book reads like an over-dramatized romance novel with a buffoon for a central character. The author also has a tendency to build up to nothing which I first noticed in "Belladonna", (which was, nevertheless, better written and more engaging than "Lunch", due to the narrator's viewpoint of the story and a more developed plot and central characters). This novel may have been quite the scandal if it were written in 1940, but it certainly doesn't cut it today. Lunch? No thanks.