Fastidious and mild-mannered, George Hall is the recently retired manager of a playground-equipment company. He enjoys small, satisfying comforts: building an art studio in the backyard; sketching; using the home espresso-maker. (“Indoor camping. A bit of an adventure.”) Life isn’t perfect. George is occasionally irritated by his wife, Jean, who, unbeknownst to him, is having an affair with an ex-colleague of his. He’s also troubled that his son Jamie is gay, and that his daughter Katie, a strong-willed single mother, is dating a man, Ray, who reminds him “of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.” All in all, George doesn’t much worry: “The secret of contentment … lay in ignoring many things completely.” But when he discovers a lesion on his hip (eczema, though he’s convinced it’s cancer), he realizes there’s something that can’t be wished away: death. And when Katie decides to marry her troublesome boyfriend, George finds that other things aren’t so easy to ignore, either. Before he knows it, he’s crouched in the fetal position on the floor, wracked with fear, lowing like a cow.

George’s psychological crisis provides the novel’s broadest comic moments, but as things fall apart, Mr. Haddon deftly chronicles the befuddlement of each and every Hall.

For Jean, the trouble begins with the announcement of Katie’s engagement, which upsets the delicate rhythm she’s settled into with her lover, a man who wears expensive aftershave and takes walking holidays in the Pyrenees.

Katie isn’t exactly sure why she’s marrying Ray. They have nothing in common. She speaks French, has studied philosophy and appreciates modern art; Ray is “good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts.” The engagement, she suspects, is something she’s fallen into.

Jamie, meanwhile, doesn’t fall into anything: He’s planned his life carefully, keeping everything—his work, the gym, his boyfriend Tony—in tidy cubbyholes. “The compartments were there for a reason,” he thinks. “It was like a zoo. You could mix chimpanzees and parrots. But take the cages away altogether and you had a bloodbath on your hands.”

A bloodbath is exactly what the Halls get—and what they need. As a family, they’re divided by many little problems and share one big one: a pathological aversion to acknowledging what’s bothering them. (The oblique quality of the Halls’ speech is inadvertently exaggerated for the American reader by Mr. Haddon’s British idioms: Characters are “chuffed,” emotional jags are “wobbles,” and so forth.) Some of this reticence is cultural—the stiff upper lip of the British bourgeoisie—and some of it is a more complicated mixture of fear and laziness.

Discussing one’s troubles is “unseemly,” George tells his psychiatrist. (The psychiatrist, a proper Brit, nods in agreement.) George wouldn’t even be speaking to a psychiatrist in the first place if his wife hadn’t insisted. And his wife wouldn’t have insisted if she, in turn, hadn’t been browbeaten by her daughter, who simply doesn’t want to deal with her father’s nervous breakdown: “Christ,” Katie thinks to herself. “Parents were meant to sort this stuff out for themselves. She didn’t want this on her plate.”

But Katie can’t escape her family any more than George can rid himself of his “cancer” by trying to snip it off with a pair of scissors, or Jean can wish away Jamie’s homosexuality by booking him and his partner into a hotel instead of letting him sleep in his own room when he comes home. And eventually they all discover that even if they could ignore each other, they wouldn’t want to. As Jamie puts it: “There’d been a moment, in Peterborough, shortly after Katie punched him, when he realized that he needed these people. Katie, Mum, Dad …. They drove him up the wall sometimes. But they’d been with him all the way. They were a part of him.”

If all this sounds predictable, well, it is. Mr. Haddon has no tricks up his sleeve this time around. The Halls are a normal family, dealing with mundane worries, and the novel they inhabit is your average comedy of manners: Several plotlines skewering domestic life collide, combust and resolve—with a big, happy wedding at the end, enlivened by a flash of drama. But Mr. Haddon is a good enough writer to raise A Spot of Bother above the ordinary. His dry, nimble style is pitch perfect, capturing the hectic anxieties of a family constantly teetering on the edge between respectability and humiliation; his restraint balances the excesses of the family high jinks. It’s a style that, like the Halls, operates by omission and understatement.

Ray, the one character who doesn’t fit the mold, an oafish former rugby player with a working-class accent, is a paragon of decency. Unlike the Halls, he has no use for indirection, and he isn’t afraid to face unpleasant facts. It finally dawns on Katie that Ray is “the kindest, most dependable, most honorable person in her life.” Ray’s no good at “chatting,” we learn early on. But he’s very good at speaking. What he says is simple and true: “I love you, wife.”

Some things are worth saying, no matter how conventional.

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Fastidious and mild-mannered, George Hall is the recently retired manager of a playground-equipment company. He enjoys small, satisfying comforts: building an art studio in the backyard; sketching; using the home espresso-maker. (“Indoor camping. A bit of an adventure.”) Life isn’t perfect. George is occasionally irritated by his wife, Jean, who, unbeknownst to him, is having an affair with an ex-colleague of his. He’s also troubled that his son Jamie is gay, and that his daughter Katie, a strong-willed single mother, is dating a man, Ray, who reminds him “of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.” All in all, George doesn’t much worry: “The secret of contentment … lay in ignoring many things completely.” But when he discovers a lesion on his hip (eczema, though he’s convinced it’s cancer), he realizes there’s something that can’t be wished away: death. And when Katie decides to marry her troublesome boyfriend, George finds that other things aren’t so easy to ignore, either. Before he knows it, he’s crouched in the fetal position on the floor, wracked with fear, lowing like a cow.

George’s psychological crisis provides the novel’s broadest comic moments, but as things fall apart, Mr. Haddon deftly chronicles the befuddlement of each and every Hall.

For Jean, the trouble begins with the announcement of Katie’s engagement, which upsets the delicate rhythm she’s settled into with her lover, a man who wears expensive aftershave and takes walking holidays in the Pyrenees.

Katie isn’t exactly sure why she’s marrying Ray. They have nothing in common. She speaks French, has studied philosophy and appreciates modern art; Ray is “good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts.” The engagement, she suspects, is something she’s fallen into.

Jamie, meanwhile, doesn’t fall into anything: He’s planned his life carefully, keeping everything—his work, the gym, his boyfriend Tony—in tidy cubbyholes. “The compartments were there for a reason,” he thinks. “It was like a zoo. You could mix chimpanzees and parrots. But take the cages away altogether and you had a bloodbath on your hands.”

A bloodbath is exactly what the Halls get—and what they need. As a family, they’re divided by many little problems and share one big one: a pathological aversion to acknowledging what’s bothering them. (The oblique quality of the Halls’ speech is inadvertently exaggerated for the American reader by Mr. Haddon’s British idioms: Characters are “chuffed,” emotional jags are “wobbles,” and so forth.) Some of this reticence is cultural—the stiff upper lip of the British bourgeoisie—and some of it is a more complicated mixture of fear and laziness.

Discussing one’s troubles is “unseemly,” George tells his psychiatrist. (The psychiatrist, a proper Brit, nods in agreement.) George wouldn’t even be speaking to a psychiatrist in the first place if his wife hadn’t insisted. And his wife wouldn’t have insisted if she, in turn, hadn’t been browbeaten by her daughter, who simply doesn’t want to deal with her father’s nervous breakdown: “Christ,” Katie thinks to herself. “Parents were meant to sort this stuff out for themselves. She didn’t want this on her plate.”

But Katie can’t escape her family any more than George can rid himself of his “cancer” by trying to snip it off with a pair of scissors, or Jean can wish away Jamie’s homosexuality by booking him and his partner into a hotel instead of letting him sleep in his own room when he comes home. And eventually they all discover that even if they could ignore each other, they wouldn’t want to. As Jamie puts it: “There’d been a moment, in Peterborough, shortly after Katie punched him, when he realized that he needed these people. Katie, Mum, Dad …. They drove him up the wall sometimes. But they’d been with him all the way. They were a part of him.”

If all this sounds predictable, well, it is. Mr. Haddon has no tricks up his sleeve this time around. The Halls are a normal family, dealing with mundane worries, and the novel they inhabit is your average comedy of manners: Several plotlines skewering domestic life collide, combust and resolve—with a big, happy wedding at the end, enlivened by a flash of drama. But Mr. Haddon is a good enough writer to raise A Spot of Bother above the ordinary. His dry, nimble style is pitch perfect, capturing the hectic anxieties of a family constantly teetering on the edge between respectability and humiliation; his restraint balances the excesses of the family high jinks. It’s a style that, like the Halls, operates by omission and understatement.

Ray, the one character who doesn’t fit the mold, an oafish former rugby player with a working-class accent, is a paragon of decency. Unlike the Halls, he has no use for indirection, and he isn’t afraid to face unpleasant facts. It finally dawns on Katie that Ray is “the kindest, most dependable, most honorable person in her life.” Ray’s no good at “chatting,” we learn early on. But he’s very good at speaking. What he says is simple and true: “I love you, wife.”

Some things are worth saying, no matter how conventional.

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Mr. Ruhlman is the author of several books about food and the restaurant industry, including The Making of a Chef (1997) and The Soul of a Chef (2000), in which he led readers into the kitchen by telling of his time attending classes at the Culinary Institute of America and writing about the lives of top cooks. But much has changed in the decade since Mr. Ruhlman became an initiate. The best chefs, once content to spend 16 hours a day chopping shallots, have become bona fide middlebrow celebrities, and diners are more likely to see them on television than at their own restaurants. Las Vegas, the very symbol of sin, has become a culinary “Gomorrah.” Even Thomas Keller, whose restaurant the French Laundry helped revolutionize American cuisine, has changed tracks. Mr. Keller, Mr. Ruhlman’s hero and collaborator (they’ve written two cookbooks together) and a living saint if there ever was one, left the Napa Valley for Las Vegas, New York and the ambiguous commercial world, lending his name to signature lines of knives and porcelain. “The chef has left the kitchen,” Mr. Ruhlman says. What he really means is that the priest has left the altar.

The Reach of a Chef is divided into five parts, each revisiting subjects from previous books. Mr. Ruhlman returns to the Culinary Institute of America, where he finds an unnervingly touchy-feely atmosphere. (“I expected it to be really hard core,” one student tells him. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”) He dines at the restaurant of Mr. Keller’s protégé, now schooled in the cutting-edge techniques of the New Gastronomy, and finds himself spritzing the taste of shrimp cocktail into his mouth. He meets a woman who’s driven five hours to see Food Network star Rachael Ray, whose singular talent is to turn pantry staples into a decent dinner in under 30 minutes. He watches in awe as Masayoshi Takayama, perhaps the last great chef of the “artist-monk” tradition, slices a piece of mackerel. And, throughout, he returns to Mr. Keller, whose strange path from cook to brand name stands for the trajectory of the industry as a whole.

Mr. Ruhlman’s loyalty lies with the great chef who’s vulnerable to a fickle public unable to recognize the profound difference between a Thomas Keller and a Britney Spears, between pure genius and commercialism. “Are we in danger of burning out on chefs,” Mr. Ruhlman asks, “of suddenly turning on them, shouting that they have no clothes on, and dumping them in favor of the latest pop idol or sports giant?” The peril in the transformation of chef from maestro-cook to brand manager, as Mr. Ruhlman sees it, is not so much to the diner as it is to the chef’s soul. “I’m losing my balance,” Mr. Keller confesses. If a man spends more time hawking porcelain than chopping shallots, is he still a chef? What exactly is a chef, anyway?

To Mr. Ruhlman, that’s an existential question, and it motivates his book. He doesn’t begrudge these chefs their wealth and fame. After all, he thinks they’ve earned it after torturously long days of intense, demanding work. And, as he points out, the days when the star chef touched every plate are long gone. He even tries to suggest that the branding of the chef is good for the average diner. “Few in the industry doubt that one of the ultimate effects of the celebrity-chef phenomenon is in part an increased awareness among Americans of where their food comes from, an awareness that has resulted in an increased availability at our grocery stores of organic or sustainably farmed produce, farm-raised chickens, and grass-fed beef,” he writes.

Still, he wanders through the once-familiar landscape with the slightly bewildered air of Rip Van Winkle. Is shrimp still shrimp if it’s found in a mouth spritzer? Is the future of cuisine really Rachael Ray’s “meatza” with cornbread-mix crust? (“I can’t watch Ray’s shows without grinding my teeth,” he writes.) Does Wolfgang Puck have more in common with Ronald McDonald than with Alain Ducasse? Is Alain Ducasse himself still a great chef? And—that question again—what exactly is a chef these days? “I’m not a chef anymore,” Mr. Keller tells Mr. Ruhlman. “And it breaks my heart.”

It breaks Mr. Ruhlman’s heart too. He writes as someone who cares deeply, not only about how finely the foie gras terrine is sliced, but also about the state of the church. He is, quite simply, an exuberant fan of the chefs he writes about—and yet he also wants to claim for them an enduring place in popular culture. The result is sometimes awkward. Covering territory that once seemed sure, Mr. Ruhlman, like Mr. Keller, loses his balance.

The narrative is an engaging and sprawling tour of the industry, concerned with everything from how to cut carrots properly to the economics of running a four-star kitchen. Michael Ruhlman writes with brio, passionately recounting every detail of every meal—and, seemingly, every conversation—in relaxed prose peppered with “gonna”s and “gotta”s and energetic punctuation (“flaxseed?!”). The ostentatiously casual style can grate, but his generosity is infectious. He loves his subject, and it’s impossible to begrudge his enthusiasm. His faith in the restaurant industry may be shaken, but his faith in great food, and great cooks, is not. And the onion, with its mystical powers, he reminds us, is not going anywhere: “We’ve all got to eat.”

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Mr. Ruhlman is the author of several books about food and the restaurant industry, including The Making of a Chef (1997) and The Soul of a Chef (2000), in which he led readers into the kitchen by telling of his time attending classes at the Culinary Institute of America and writing about the lives of top cooks. But much has changed in the decade since Mr. Ruhlman became an initiate. The best chefs, once content to spend 16 hours a day chopping shallots, have become bona fide middlebrow celebrities, and diners are more likely to see them on television than at their own restaurants. Las Vegas, the very symbol of sin, has become a culinary “Gomorrah.” Even Thomas Keller, whose restaurant the French Laundry helped revolutionize American cuisine, has changed tracks. Mr. Keller, Mr. Ruhlman’s hero and collaborator (they’ve written two cookbooks together) and a living saint if there ever was one, left the Napa Valley for Las Vegas, New York and the ambiguous commercial world, lending his name to signature lines of knives and porcelain. “The chef has left the kitchen,” Mr. Ruhlman says. What he really means is that the priest has left the altar.

The Reach of a Chef is divided into five parts, each revisiting subjects from previous books. Mr. Ruhlman returns to the Culinary Institute of America, where he finds an unnervingly touchy-feely atmosphere. (“I expected it to be really hard core,” one student tells him. “I’ve been a little disappointed.”) He dines at the restaurant of Mr. Keller’s protégé, now schooled in the cutting-edge techniques of the New Gastronomy, and finds himself spritzing the taste of shrimp cocktail into his mouth. He meets a woman who’s driven five hours to see Food Network star Rachael Ray, whose singular talent is to turn pantry staples into a decent dinner in under 30 minutes. He watches in awe as Masayoshi Takayama, perhaps the last great chef of the “artist-monk” tradition, slices a piece of mackerel. And, throughout, he returns to Mr. Keller, whose strange path from cook to brand name stands for the trajectory of the industry as a whole.

Mr. Ruhlman’s loyalty lies with the great chef who’s vulnerable to a fickle public unable to recognize the profound difference between a Thomas Keller and a Britney Spears, between pure genius and commercialism. “Are we in danger of burning out on chefs,” Mr. Ruhlman asks, “of suddenly turning on them, shouting that they have no clothes on, and dumping them in favor of the latest pop idol or sports giant?” The peril in the transformation of chef from maestro-cook to brand manager, as Mr. Ruhlman sees it, is not so much to the diner as it is to the chef’s soul. “I’m losing my balance,” Mr. Keller confesses. If a man spends more time hawking porcelain than chopping shallots, is he still a chef? What exactly is a chef, anyway?

To Mr. Ruhlman, that’s an existential question, and it motivates his book. He doesn’t begrudge these chefs their wealth and fame. After all, he thinks they’ve earned it after torturously long days of intense, demanding work. And, as he points out, the days when the star chef touched every plate are long gone. He even tries to suggest that the branding of the chef is good for the average diner. “Few in the industry doubt that one of the ultimate effects of the celebrity-chef phenomenon is in part an increased awareness among Americans of where their food comes from, an awareness that has resulted in an increased availability at our grocery stores of organic or sustainably farmed produce, farm-raised chickens, and grass-fed beef,” he writes.

Still, he wanders through the once-familiar landscape with the slightly bewildered air of Rip Van Winkle. Is shrimp still shrimp if it’s found in a mouth spritzer? Is the future of cuisine really Rachael Ray’s “meatza” with cornbread-mix crust? (“I can’t watch Ray’s shows without grinding my teeth,” he writes.) Does Wolfgang Puck have more in common with Ronald McDonald than with Alain Ducasse? Is Alain Ducasse himself still a great chef? And—that question again—what exactly is a chef these days? “I’m not a chef anymore,” Mr. Keller tells Mr. Ruhlman. “And it breaks my heart.”

It breaks Mr. Ruhlman’s heart too. He writes as someone who cares deeply, not only about how finely the foie gras terrine is sliced, but also about the state of the church. He is, quite simply, an exuberant fan of the chefs he writes about—and yet he also wants to claim for them an enduring place in popular culture. The result is sometimes awkward. Covering territory that once seemed sure, Mr. Ruhlman, like Mr. Keller, loses his balance.

The narrative is an engaging and sprawling tour of the industry, concerned with everything from how to cut carrots properly to the economics of running a four-star kitchen. Michael Ruhlman writes with brio, passionately recounting every detail of every meal—and, seemingly, every conversation—in relaxed prose peppered with “gonna”s and “gotta”s and energetic punctuation (“flaxseed?!”). The ostentatiously casual style can grate, but his generosity is infectious. He loves his subject, and it’s impossible to begrudge his enthusiasm. His faith in the restaurant industry may be shaken, but his faith in great food, and great cooks, is not. And the onion, with its mystical powers, he reminds us, is not going anywhere: “We’ve all got to eat.”

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.