...the concept never fully caramelizes. The women’s transgressions don’t quite graduate from what we might call the indie-movie school of emotional growth: spontaneous dance parties, impromptu drug use, spur-of-the-moment vandalism ... This is one of Williams’s strengths: an exquisite patience with the emerging texture of an emotion. As a stylist, she is subtle and superbly attentive, though her approach does leave a few darlings unkilled ... But where Williams truly shines is, if you’ll forgive me, in the kitchen. The food in this book eats you. (It literally changed my dinner plans) ... These interludes perfume the narrative, like aromatics in a stock, imparting a depth of flavor that resurfaces stylishly when you least expect it.
If you’ve ever had to suffer through a woman talking about how she’s being 'so bad' for eating a chocolate-chip cookie, Lara Williams’s debut will leave you panting and ravenous ... In its unselfconscious splendor, the supper club (and the book) tackles age-old questions about the female form with a delightfully 21st-century voice.
The generation described here is millennial, and the voice feels akin to Sally Rooney’s: colloquial, precise, at once uneasy about its place in the world and determined to stand up for itself ... The central theme here is women’s oppression by men, and Williams’s take on it is powerful and original ... The joy of food – its capacity to be so pleasurable that it can subvert niceness – is well described, as is the complexity of cooking. There are some lengthy digressions on the kitchen that maintain enough obsessive verve to be engaging, allowing Williams to take the material of the domestic novel and turn it into something more explosive ... I sometimes found their preoccupations and mental states a little overdeterminedly millennial. All these young women are lost in the world of work, anxious and inadequate; Roberta regularly self-harms. But the point here may be that she and her friends feel trapped by their generation and its stereotypes as well. Certainly the writing becomes most insightful and moving when we sense her pushing against her bounds, while not quite knowing how to do so.
The conceit of Lara Williams' second novel is a bold and aggressively indelicate one that challenges society’s expectations of women’s appetites — for food, sex, pleasure, all of it ... woven through with delectable food writing, cooking tutorials with almost erotic descriptions of souffles and caramelized onions ... The set-up sounds like Fight Club for women but ends up more complicated and interesting than that ... excels as a complex psychological portrait of a young woman shaped by abuses both brutal and casual and whose present-day relationships continue to be threatened by the reverberations of that abuse ... bursting with deep meditations on the lives of women and how they’re shaped and distorted by men who are careless, monstrous and all points in between. But those ideas never quite coalesce into a clear, ringing note, in part because Roberta remains difficult to inhabit throughout. She’s a smartly rendered character with an articulated psyche, but while her damage makes sense, it’s also distancing, even after several hundred pages inside her head ... Still, that the story doesn’t quite satisfyingly fulfill the promise of its premise seems secondary to the book’s ambition. Supper Club fascinates as an unflinching embrace of women and their many appetites, drowning the patriarchy in Béchamel.
The novel’s greatest strength are the passages that punctuate the shifts in time frame ... they read like the introductions to the recipes of a highly personable cookbook ... These passages have a delicious fuck-you carnality to them, but their self-assurance is at odds with the usually tongue-tied Roberta, and tonally discordant. There are a lot of dud filler lines which could have been cut altogether ... Sometimes they barely make sense ... the fine food writing takes on the aura of a set piece, and means that this novel doesn’t quite live up to its own promise ... I yearn for books about women sating their hungers ... Lara Williams has certainly made a good start.
Williams’ U.S. debut story collection, A Selfie as Big as the Ritz (2017), introduced a keen chronicler of contemporary women’s lives; her sly, perceptive first novel does it one better, and offers food for thought on the sorts of love (and sorts of women) that society doesn’t accommodate.
Williams’s first novel delivers a poignant tale of a woman finding her place in the world as she approaches the big three-oh. An homage to female rage and the bonds of friendship, this will entice readers like a gourmet feast and leave them just as satisfied.
Mixing together insights about food and friendship, hunger and happiness, and the space women allot themselves in the world today, Williams writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom, serving up distinctive characters and a delectably unusual story ... Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.
