A Certain Hunger
Thoughts on reading A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers.
Start Date: 30 April 2022. End Date: 2 May 2022.
I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche. Mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger. Both establishments serve chopped beef, but one is indiscriminate to the point of ubiquity whereas the other is carnal dining at its bespoke finest.
Should I call this book disturbing? It is after all about a food critic who enjoys the liver of her impaled lover as much as foie gras. But before you dismiss this novel because our psychopath sounds a lot like Dr Hannibal Lecter, I would urge you to read a few pages before putting the novel down; mixing metaphors as she lavishly describes food, love and sex, the book is occasionally as profound as it is unnerving.
Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.
Somewhere, a hundred pages in, there’s also an earnest critique of capitalist consumerism and the rise of internet influencer culture. It can also be read as a feminist manifesto of sorts, I think. There are plenty of titbits scattered throughout the novel that can be structured into a cogent argument against modern womanhood and femininity. But it is a feminist novel, women take center stage and men are shamelessly objectified (and consumed).
We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing… It’s as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.
The writing is lucid, dripping with candour and knitted with silken prose. The author, unsurprisingly, mentions Bret Easton Ellis and Elizabeth Gilbert in the acknowledgement. I think that ought to tell you everything you could expect from this novel.
We talk about love like it’s an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.
I enjoyed it. But, just as I don’t go around asking people to read American Psycho, I would not recommend it to anyone offhand.