During the Renaissance, the French writer Francois Rabelais turned his back on the ascetic pieties of the day and celebrated the physical pleasures of food, drink and sex.

	"The Epicure's Lament" By Kate Christensen Doubleday ($23.95)

In "Gargantua and Pantagruel" -- a comic masterpiece that rejoices in excess and extremity -- he mocked oppressive religious and political forces while neatly summing up his philosophy: "Drink always and you shall never die."

Kate Christensen shares more than ribald humor with the 15th-century French humorist. In her third novel, she uses satire and an iconoclastic narrator to deftly comment on our own orthodoxies -- now neatly encapsulated in the discourses of health and longevity -- and their ineffectiveness to act as antidotes for our own malaise.

Written as the diary of Hugo Whittier, the novel is the story of a self-enamored but equally self-loathing trust-fund hermit who lives in his ancestral home overlooking the Hudson River.

Suffering a rare vascular disease, he has decided to continue smoking despite its horrific implications for his health. As much as any of Rabelais's sybarites, he has decided to let his corporal being embody his human condition.

Rabelais had confidence in the individual and preached fais ce que voudras, or "do what thou wilt."

Hugo, however, is not so sure. He thinks death may be the best solution to his misery, and it seems his philosophy is "smoke and you will die."

But before he can snuff himself out, he is reluctantly dragged back into humanity by a group of intrusive relatives whose very ineptness demands his involvement in their lives.

Unendingly frustrated, Hugo is even more convinced that seclusion and removal from life are his final solution.

While, admittedly, a 40- year-old egoist smoking himself to death while attempting to ignore his relatives may not sound very promising for the premise of a novel, Christensen renders Hugo's misanthropic observations and dyspeptic annoyance into a bawdy, intellectually complex diatribe.

One finds oneself agreeing with Hugo; after all, he does have a savvy reasoning with his quotidian struggles. When chastised for killing himself, he logically accuses everyone of following suit:

"You drive a car; you use plastic products, you do whatever the hell you do knowing full well that it's contributing to the end of everyone. ... You could see me as the canary down the mine shaft."

Hugo is the self-proclaimed love child of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne and M.F.K. Fisher, the doyenne of American food writers.

Contact with so many people is wearing, and Hugo resigns himself to hosting a family Christmas, after which he'll hurry along with his impending death. He puts himself in charge of cooking his last meal and considers de Montaigne's final words of prayer:

"What inanity is everything!"

The nastier the novel becomes, the funnier it gets, and, like Rabelais, this is where Christensen excels. While we may not think so at the time, there can be a great deal of humor in our anguish.

Christensen is in love with language, and her writing is unafraid to uncover the humanity simmering beneath the opinionated, the vulgar, the self-serving and the downright evil.

Wielding satire with the finesse of a four-star chef, Christensen challenges the absurdity of our time with doubt and hope; her stewing protagonist and his seasoned compatriots serve up the literary equivalent of coq au vin. This is a gutsy and unabashedly delicious novel.