A Review of Little Feasts by Jules Archer
“If I could marry a myth it would be monstrous, but not monstrous like frightening — monstrous as in a monstrous love” states the narrator of “How to Love a Monster with Average-Sized Hands” in Jules Archer’s collection Little Feasts. It is a monstrous love that is explored in this collection, the women are desirous, hungry, for it, while the men are monstrous and running, running towards the women or away from them or away with them. The stories team with this hunger, this passion — the absolute heat and power of it. Hunger begins to feel a lot like love and love becomes all consuming, powerful, monstrous. Jules Archer skillfully examines and explores the desire to devour and be devoured.
The struggle to fulfill the need to be loved only serves to fuel this hunger. In the opening story “In-n-Out Doesn’t Have Bacon” the narrator, Catherine, who hungers for meat, who sleeps with Tom while grieving the death of her husband, puts it best: “My stomach feels greasy from the burger, from Tom, from some strange artificial sense of connection.” Food and love are basic human needs but she is filling herself with the wrong things, with fast food and a man who is more interested in her sister than in her. Her grief, her hunger have driven her to these things and she has filled herself but is still left wanting. “Hunger never felt so hard.” Catherine says.
It’s the same for Elizabeth in “Everlasting Full” Elizabeth who was cold and hungry until she ate her husband Eddie when he said that he would stop cooking for her. Ginny in “Hard to Carry and Fit in a Trunk” eats but is still hungry to be chased, wanted. So much so that she fantasizes about being kidnapped, particularly by Buffalo Bill who covets her size, who would celebrate her hunger. There is a striking and terrifying honesty in the way Ginny wants to be skinny enough to be considered ‘prey’. Here, Archer is holding up a mirror to society with our beauty standards, our rape culture and we deserved to be loved, but not like this. These stories push wanting to the extreme but that is what wanting to be loved feels like — a huge overwhelming hunger that we would do anything to get, and anything to keep.
The dangers of women loving men run under the surface of all the stories. There is a never-ending reminder of how our desires mix with our vulnerabilities, how our hunger puts us at risk. Forever in the back of the women’s minds is the fact that they love, they hunger, for someone who could kill them. In “My L.A Jerry” the narrator exaggerates this knowledge by having an affair with a man, a stranger who visits the Museum of Death where she works. “Nothing says romance like a dismembered headless torso.” She muses.
In these stories, however, the women get angry and they fight back. In these stories expectations are challenged, tropes are subverted and the men get eaten or beaten and the women take power into their own hands.
In “Far Away From Everywhere” the narrator, only a teenager, is in a family taken into a cult by the father. Her anger buzzes in her body like bees, her anger is hot. Her friend Sissy lights a match and burns everything down and the narrator, with her sister, move to warmer Phoenix with their grandmother. This transition from cold and hunger to warmth and safety repeats. Elizabeth is angry about the cold and hunger she experienced as a child and vows to keep herself safe whatever the cost. When Elizabeth meets the man she is to marry she is in a cold bar but his hands are hot and warm her up, she does whatever it takes to keep this warmth. In “Backseat Blues” Maybell’s mother drives into the cold lake while Maybell, angry at her mother and more attracted to the light and warmth outside of the car, was spared. In “Skillet” a pan is passed down, daughter to daughter, sizzling and cooking. The narrator practices swinging it high as she looks at her mother’s face, bruised by her boyfriend. The images of anger mixing with heat, coupled with the idea of warmth equaling safety, leads to the idea that a woman’s anger can keep her safe.
Archer also plays with form, updating tired old horror movie tropes. In “The Ice Cream Cone” the narrator is running from a man, she notes how he should not being able to chase her so well due to his weight and lack of grace but this is how a typical horror movie goes; the woman stands no chance regardless of what the man looks like. Archer lists what this woman has had to learn as a result of growing up in this world “the boy in high school sticking his sneakered foot in your crotch beneath your conjoined desks.” And because she has escaped before (over and over), she escapes again. She stops, turns and pokes his belly with her pink ice cream spoon. The spoon, an image reminiscent of childhood, like a nod to how girls are forced to learn the possibility of danger so soon. And with that the trope is quite literally stopped in its tracks.
Archer’s matter-of-fact language faces head-on the realities of what it is like to be a woman in our society. She pairs this style with beautiful turns of phrase and fantastical elements to create a dreaminess and playfulness that evokes childhood. The overall effect being that Little Feasts presents a complex picture of what it is to want to love as a women who has grown up in this world. Her stories are bold, unapologetic, honest, and tender. It is a beautiful collection that encourages its readers to explore their desires and needs, and to confront their ingrained fears. We cannot fight the wanting but we can fight for what we want.
