Daria Lavelle’s debut novel Aftertaste connects food, loss and longing in the story of a Ukrainian immigrant in New York

In the opening scene of Daria Lavelle’s blazingly original debut novel, Aftertaste, 11-year-old Konstantin – an immigrant to America from Ukraine – is sitting with his legs dangling in the public pool in Brighton Beach, New York, when “something travelled across his tongue” unbidden – the taste of his late father’s favourite dish, pechonka.

It is not a dish Konstantin has ever tasted before, but it is there, fully formed – chicken liver, sauteed onions, dill, lemon – “spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again”. It will be many years, however, until he fully grasps what these aftertastes are, what they might mean and how, through trial and error, he might use them to reunite people with their deceased loved ones in a New York City restaurant designed to serve closure.

When I speak to New Jersey-based Lavelle over video call, she laughs when I suggest it sounds like the idea for the novel arrived much the same way for her, almost as an aftertaste of its own. “I have not until this moment made that connection,” she says, smiling, “but you’re absolutely right.” It was in 2013 when she had the first idea for the novel, “and it came almost fully formed”.

To begin with she pictured "a scene that actually wound up in the middle of the book. But it was a chef making this meal in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment. The brick was crumbling. The apartment was kind of seedy, and he was cooking this dish, but he didn’t really look like a chef. He didn’t look like somebody who did this all the time. And he was very meticulously plating something, and when he finished, he set it on the counter, and a ghost came through the wall to try to eat it. And that was the kernel.” (Food metaphor slips into Lavelle’s language in this way as we speak – she went on to follow the “breadcrumbs” of the story).

At first, like young Konstantin, “I couldn’t quite figure it out,” she says. “I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t know who the ghost was.” So, like him, Lavelle set about discovering the answers, in her case “writing different ways into it”, following the breadcrumbs. As she did, the parallels between Lavelle – whose family moved to New York from Kyiv when she was two – and Konstantin that emerged were no coincidence, she tells me.

“I started to put myself into him and my background and my experience as a Ukrainian immigrant, and my experience with food and my experience with loss. Food was one of the primary ways that I was able to access my Ukrainian culture and my heritage and keep all of those traditions alive,” she says. “I couldn’t remember the streets that I had been on or the places I played. But I could remember food.”

I wanted to make sure that the novel had as much joy in it as it had more thoughtful and introverted and sad moments 

The spiritual element, too, she continues, was also rooted in her heritage. “My family is superstitious,” she tells me. “I was raised and genuinely don’t believe that death is an ending. Love is a tether, as much as food in this book, and it’s the love and the memories that can bring somebody back to us. And so I wanted to give Konstantin the experience of death not being the end. Of there being more to eat and do and experience beyond that, so that even if the world you’re in is going to shambles, there’s another chance to see someone you love again.”

The writing of these themes became even more heightened when, some way through writing the novel, Russia invaded Ukraine. “I was halfway, three quarters of the way through a draft, and it changed my connection to Konstantin almost immediately. I knew, seeing what was happening, seeing our friends and family try to survive and experience this absolute devastation to their lives, and they’re still experiencing it, I wanted the things that I really noticed – this immense bravery and indomitability and this desire to survive and surpass the hardship – I wanted to make sure that Konstantin was a character who communicated that.”

Lavelle took a break from writing, realising she “couldn’t go back to the book right away [and] had to put it to the side and process what was happening for a number of weeks”, but “when I finally came back to it, I kept thinking: what wouldn’t those people give to see that loved one that just suddenly was gone from them?” As she continued writing, however, she realised she wanted the novel to not only be a “story with ghosts and death and grief” but for it to also be “laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining and sexy and have a lot of life in it. I wanted to make sure that it had as much joy in it as it had more thoughtful and introverted and sad moments,” she explains.

Much of this joy comes from the food, and the associated stories, lives and memories, filling its detail-rich pages. “This is my personal love letter to many places in New York that I love and genuinely go to all the time.” Lavelle, she admits, is a self-confessed “amateur foodie” who has “travelled to a lot of places, basically to eat” with her husband.

“One of the strange things about writing this book, in large part during lockdown, was I couldn’t physically visit those places. And restaurants have always been my comfort place. I love to go to a restaurant – it makes me feel taken care of and enveloped and warm and cosy and just alive inside. When we had our massive shutdown here in the US, I was living at the time right across the water from Manhattan, trapped in my apartment with my husband, young twins and our dog, and I could see some of the skyline. And I thought, if only I could go to those restaurants. I couldn’t physically go, but I could go in my mind and re-experience some of those dishes.”