Supper Club by Lara Williams - review

First novels about rape and its effects on women are one of the big new publishing trends. Thanks to the #MeToo movement, young women today have been given a fresh voice to speak out about what constitutes consensual as opposed to non-consensual sex, whether a man should learn to recognise non-verbal cues better, and other thorny issues. Most of these questions remain unresolved; indeed, judging from what’s coming out of the publishers’ catalogues, women are as angry now as they were back in the Sixties and Seventies, when the first wave of feminist literature on sexual harassment began. So what’s new?

Well, for a start, the number of new authors who are choosing to fictionalise these experiences to appeal to a commercial audience, supported by publishers who are paying out whopping advances, that’s what. There’s clearly an appetite at the moment for what might crudely be called rape-lit, although whether these novels will earn out or not remains to be seen.

And it is women’s unassuaged appetites — for food as well as sex — that is the main theme of Lara Williams’s debut novel. Twenty-nine-year-old Roberta has a dull job working at a fashion website, where she meets and befriends bisexual Stevie. They immediately hit it off and decide to start a supper club for themselves and other “hungry” women, who have been disappointed by men.

Held in secret locations, the women can meet to eat, drink, talk, scream, take drugs, dance, throw up and generally do whatever they want, without male company, obviously. Roberta gets to indulge her love of cooking, and has a sideline in dumpster diving.

The narrative flips back and forth between her life as it is now and as it was 10 years earlier, when she was a student — feeling isolated, miserable and hung up about food. “My eating, my bottomless, yearning hunger, was a horror,” Roberta reflects.

And of course men treated her badly then too. One, a student called Michael, picked her up in a restaurant and invited her back to his place to watch a movie. She was drunk and fell asleep on his bed, only to wake up later and realise something was wrong. “I registered the heft of a body on top of my own. The absence of my underwear. I am having sex, I thought. Oh god, I am having sex”. Later she began another abusive relationship with an older lecturer called Arnold, who she would visit for sex even though he was callous. Interspersed between these two narratives, which are at times confusingly melded, are a series of culinary riffs: how to make a starter dough, spaghetti alla puttanesca, a soufflé or Thai red curry, for example. These are extremely well done, Williams’s enthusiasm for good food is attractive, and she writes with a pleasingly fluent style, but there is something altogether unresolved and unsatisfying about this book — both Roberta’s character and her story.

Perhaps this is because parts of it were also the author’s story — but the big questions remain unanswered.

Supper Club by Lara Williams (Hamish Hamilton £12.99)