THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 27CHELSEA G. SUMMERS’Sdebut, “A
Certain Hunger,” opens in a hotel
bar not unlike other hotel bars.
“They all look the same,” Dorothy,
a middle-aged food critic and our
antiheroine, tells us. “Hotel bars
smell like class privilege, despera-
tion and hope.” “Anti” might be too
weak of a prefix to describe this
heroine: She’s more of an outright
villain, a red-haired seductress in
leagues — culinary, homicidal —
traditionally dominated by men.
“As a woman psychopath, the
white tiger of human psychologi-
cal deviance,” Dorothy says, “I am
a wonder, and I relish your awe.”
The man who approaches Doro-
thy in this particular hotel bar
meets a violent — and frankly gro-
tesque — end, and what follows is
one of the most uniquely fun and
campily gory books in my recent
memory. It’s apt that Dorothy
once worked at a magazine called
Noir, because “A Certain Hunger”
has the voice of a hard-boiled de-
tective novel, as if metaphor-
happy Raymond Chandler
handed the reins over to the
sexed-up femme fatale and really
let her fly.
Is the voice inviting? Sure, as in-
viting as a kidnapper holding a
knife to your throat and threat-
ening, “Don’t move until I’ve fin-
ished my story.” The descriptions
of violence and gourmet cuisine
are so visceral that I felt alternat-
ingly hungry and sick to my stom-
ach. The writer Janet Fitch says
the author’s ultimate goal is to give
readers a pleasurable inner con-
flict, wanting to turn the pages
faster while also lingering on each
beautifully written sentence. With
Summers’s writing, I kept re-
reading sentences only as a double
take, whispering to myself, “Man,
this lady is screwed up”— which is,
I’d argue, its own kind of pleasure.
Dorothy narrates the story of
her life from the bleak interior of
the Bedford Hills Correctional Fa-
cility, where she’s currently im-
prisoned for her many sordid
crimes. This “autobiography” jog-
gles between her incarceration —
teeming with the kinds of bodies
and institutional food she would-
n’t have touched with a 10-foot
fork in the outside world — and
the glamorous life that led her
there. That is, the food and the
men she consumed along the way.
Dorothy’s sexual appetite is of-
ten conflated with her literal one,
and to an uncanny degree — she
literally consumes men. Her
hunger is like a set of teeth, an
endlessly chomping maw that
knows no satiety. As expected in a
food critic’s “memoir,” there’s a cu-
linary metaphor for every occa-
sion: A love affair as “innocent as
milk.” A fact as “clear as con-
sommé.” A court witness as “cool
as bisque and twice as satiny.” It’s
not always appetizing, especially
when food is compared to the hu-
man body: like the popcorn boxes
that are “the bright colors of lipids
and blood.” Eventually, Dorothy’s
twin passions become one: When
she slices off a piece of a man’s
buttocks, it’s a delicious “rump
roast,” perfect for seasoning with
herbs and wine. It’s a gruesome
love letter to rich food and rich
men, and to gorging on both with
abandon.
Don’t get me wrong, “A Certain
Hunger” is not justa novel about
the demise of a foodie serial killer.
It’s also a history of the internet,
and how it has democratized writ-ing and “steamrolled the playing
field” of criticism broadly. There’s
a feminist argument, too, beneath
the lyrical exaltations about sex
with Italian men and cooking with
duck fat. Why is it that women
have been kept out of so many in-
dustries, including Patrick Bate-
man-style serial murders? Be-
cause, Dorothy thinks, people
don’t wantto believe women can
do the job. “Feminism comes to all
things,” she says, “but it comes to
recognizing homicidal rage the
slowest.”
Summers writes at once like a
historian — enfolding within the
novel histories of the industrial
meat complex, wine, truffle hunt-
ing, the U.S.D.A., cannibalism —
and like an anatomist, explaining
kosher butchery in such gory de-
tail that I squinted the way I might
squint in a slasher movie, lest I get
too nauseated. And yet, there was
also something soothing and es-
capist about reading a fictional vil-
lain’s story, especially at a time
when real life feels like its own
horror show.
They say books instill empathy,
but it can be just as exhilarating to
read a novel in which the narrator
doesn’t have any. It makes the
reader ask herself, “What would I
say and do, if I could say or do any-
thing, without a conscience to
hem me in?” Maybe I’d be the ulti-
mate hedonist. Probably I’d just
read a book about one. 0Savage Appetite
A psychopathic food critic literally consumes the men she targets.
By AMY SILVERBERG
A CERTAIN HUNGER
By Chelsea G. Summers
254 pp. The Unnamed Press. $26.
AMY SILVERBERGis a writer, comedian
and Ph.D. candidate at the Univer-
sity of Southern California. Her work
has appeared in The Paris Review,
Best American Short Stories, The
New Yorker and on Comedy Central.
ZELOOT