Lunch at the Piccadilly was published by Algonquin Books in 2003. Lil Olive is in her late seventies, recently moved to an assisted living facility that she hates, and her three adult children are engaged in a slow-motion negotiation over who will take primary responsibility for her care. None of them wants to, but all of them want to appear as though they do — and Edgerton mines the gap between appearance and reality with devastating comic precision.
Meanwhile, Lil eats lunch every day at the Piccadilly Cafeteria, where she befriends Carl, a young man with a suspended driver’s license and uncertain prospects. Their friendship — intergenerational, uncomplicated by family obligation, and built on nothing more than shared meals and honest conversation — provides the novel’s emotional counterweight to the family’s calculations.
Edgerton’s subject here is the American family’s failure to deal honestly with aging — the euphemisms (assisted living, independent care, memory wing), the guilt, the financial maneuvering, and the fundamental unwillingness to sacrifice comfort for obligation. The novel is funny because Edgerton’s ear for self-justification is unerring: each sibling has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they can’t take Mom in, and each explanation is a masterpiece of self-serving logic.
Collecting Lunch at the Piccadilly
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 2003): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12