Elza's Kitchen, by Marc Fitten

Sometimes, it's the little things that trigger the avalanches in life. An offhand remark we can't forget. A routine exam. A chance meeting.

For 48-year-old Elza Molnar, it's a photograph of her ex-husband and his new family in a studio portrait she stumbles onto one evening as she window shops in the town square. "He looked content. Blissful even," this man whose dreams of domesticity Elza escaped 20 years ago. She attended culinary school, became a chef, and went on to open a highly successful restaurant.

So why should a picture of him make her the least bit uneasy, let alone convince her that her wonderful life is merely "second rate"?

In his second novel, Atlanta author Marc Fitten again combines a charming fable, comedy and mouth-watering descriptions of Hungarian cuisine to take a serious look at post-Soviet Hungary in the story of a middle-aged chef whose discontent leads to an ambitious attempt to improve upon her restaurant's popularity — with hilarious and telling results.

Elza has run the Tulip, tucked away in Delibab, for the past ten years — since the fall of communism in 1989. Her specialties are traditional Hungarian favorites: Chicken Paprika, sour cherry soup, Shepard's Goulash, and "potato pancakes — golden fried disks covered with a healthy dollop of sour cream and shredded Havarti cheese."

Her loyal customers have made her rich, regulars eager for care and feeding, "released from the clutches of socialism [like] children let out to recess after years of mental cruelty at the hands of a bitter schoolmarm and her dilapidated classroom." She has charmed them ever since, a "gastronomic courtesan" skilled at pandering to their needs and feigning interest with smiles and small talk.

But the unexpected glimpse of her past catapults Elza into a deepening dissatisfaction with the present. The fruits of her labor — a luxury apartment, fancy clothes and a "vacation in Corfu every summer" — aren't enough. She sums up the smugly satisfied people in her restaurant as "fat, newly rich, and mindlessly happy ... like escaped walruses and ostriches stomping along zoo grounds in top hats and scarves." Even her romance with Tulip's virile young sous-chef is found wanting, and chucked.

Her hunt for the cause of her despondency culminates in what Elza is sure will be its cure: a plan to lure a famous food critic to her restaurant in hopes of winning the coveted Silver Ladle Award. The magazine he works for is doing a special issue on "restaurants in the former Eastern Bloc." If she's lucky, it could mean a Michelin star — incontrovertible proof of first-rate success.

If she's not, well ... things couldn't get much worse. Her depression has created chaos in the workplace. Her ex-boy toy and the brand-new blonde pastry chef can't keep their hands off each other. Elza's jealousy is off the charts. Customers are complaining. In a fit of fury, Elza accidentally injures one of the Gypsy boys who beg outside the Tulip, and now, a couple of their sinister relatives are shadowing her.

Fitten, who was born in Brooklyn to Panamanian parents and raised in the Bronx, moved to Atlanta to attend high school. After graduation, he lived in Hungary for five years; it was a time, he says, when he "watched a country leapfrog from 1956 to the dawn of the twenty-first century practically overnight." His debut novel, "Valeria's Last Stand" (2009), introduced what Fitten calls his "Paprika Trilogy": three books linked by their exploration of different generations of Hungarians adjusting to the fall of socialism and the new demands of runaway capitalism.

Fitten tracks Hungary's embrace of capitalism in Elza's clientele, the "newly minted bourgeoisie," and, in the form of her canoodling young pastry cooks, the new generation licking its chops at the prospect of unbridled opportunities, with barely an apprenticeship in the old ways. Likewise, we see the country's growing pains in the Gypsy boys who bang on Tulip's windows, begging for scraps — a glimpse of the losses suffered by the Roma, a persecuted minority who fared far better under communism, which guaranteed them jobs, housing and a more secure social order.

If "Valeria" contemplated the effects of regime change on the elderly — who mourned the security of socialism as a "golden age" — "Elza's Kitchen" moves to the perspective of a younger woman who has thrived under a decade of capitalism. Unfortunately, Elza can't compare with the outrageously fun sourpuss Fitten introduced in Valeria, a woman who despised the march of capitalism with its deluge of material goods and bland vegetables. Nor does "Elza's Kitchen" offer the rowdy humor and enjoyably bad behavior that erupted from the pages of "Valeria's Last Stand" — though it comes close in a section describing the Critic's attempt to allay his grief over the loss of his beloved dog with an obliging prostitute.

Elza's journey, like her cuisine, is more "inward-looking." Perhaps the biggest obstacle to progress in "Elza's Kitchen" is the one preventing its heroine from distinguishing what she does best from what she has no real passion for. Whether we interpret her struggles as personal or universal, we can learn from them to look more closely at who, and what, we really love.

7 p.m., July 11, free reading and signing, Carter Presidential Library & Museum Theater, 441 Freedom Parkway, Atlanta, 404-865-7100, http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/