Lunch at the Piccadilly

By Clyde Edgerton
2003
265 pages. Audio: 6 hours and 16 minutes
Fiction

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Clyde Edgerton is a Southern writer. Not only is he from the South, but you can actually hear the Southern accents of his characters. I will grant that if you are from the South you might enjoy Edgington’s novels a little more, but I assure you he has fans all over the country.

Lunch at the Piccadilly is my favorite post-2000 Edgerton novel but probably not my favorite all-time. That honor would go to Killer Diller from 1991. And since I’m trying to sell you on Clyde Edgerton and not just this one novel, here is a quick rundown on Killer Diller. It is about a Southern Christian college. You like it already, right? The president is a sleepwalker, so in the middle of the night he’s walking around smiling and shaking hands. The college music group performs hymns except when no one’s around, and then of course they rock out. There is a hilarious and sweet relationship between an ex-con who has found Christianity due to an old sister and a developmentally challenged young man.

I give you this background because it is important to understanding Lunch at the Piccadilly, which takes place largely in a nursing home. It is also deeply relational, and I assure you the residents of this nursing home are hilarious. Don’t be surprised if there’s a breakout in a stolen car.

Which brings me to the real reason I love Clyde Edgerton. Much of comedy today is built around crass profanity, or worse, making fun of those you don’t like or even sometimes those you do. Those who have heard me preach know that I take humor very seriously. Story and humor are two of the primary ways that we breach the guarded places of our listeners’ hearts. There is almost nothing that can’t be said if it is said with grace and humor.

The trick, of course, is to see the humor in all things human. If we develop the ability to stand back and look at ourselves, humor is one of the better responses. Life certainly has its tragic moments, yet much of life is surely comedy. And that’s where Clyde Edgerton comes in. How can he write a book like Lunch at the Piccadilly filled with gentle humor and occasional knee-slapping hilarity without ever giving the impression that he’s making fun of his characters? He seems to genuinely like and respect the characters he has created. I’ve seen this over and over again in all of his books with his sometimes-eccentric cast of characters. That’s the kind of humor I want to bring into my life and preaching—the ability to look at myself, the world around me, and those endlessly fascinating human beings that God has placed in my life, and respond with laughter and (more importantly) with love.

In this book we will find ourselves laughing along with but never at our fellow travelers. Read it. Then go and do likewise.