The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Hell by Kathryn Davis
Frank Kooistra

Kathryn Davis. Hell. Ecco, 1998. 179 pp. $22.00.

This postmodern novel by Kathryn Davis (Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Leaf) uses food as the central metaphor for safety and order, a metaphor which fails to sustain two families, one a 1955 Philadelphia family struck by hurricane Hazel, and the other a nineteenth-century house kept in good order by Edwina Moss, an expert at housekeeping and a masterful cook. Both houses contain anorexic daughters, neither of whom can be protected from destructive forces outside their respective houses. The anorexic adolescent girl living in a twentieth-century Philadelphia suburb loses a girlfriend to murder or the hurricane (no conclusions can be drawn about the circumstances of the death), and the nineteenth-century homemaker Edwina has to endure a doctor who tries to make money from her anorexic daughter’s condition, and she must also say goodbye to her union-soldier husband, who goes off to war and ends up in the Battle of the Wilderness, perhaps burned to death in the general conflagration which is war.
If food sustains us and the house in which food is prepared protects us, Davis is determined to show us that both houses and food can do little for daughters who refuse to eat. Davis juxtaposes lines from Little Women, which give us a glimpse of a loving family, with her Philadelphia household, which seems to offer little love. The nineteenth-century Moss household seems more loving.
Homemakers and chefs spend their lives learning to fix meals expertly, but food is not enough, in either household, to deflect chance and fate. Davis’s book becomes a postmodern version of Günter Grass’s The Flounder, which also chronicles the generations by means of food. Grass’s mammoth novel might be the easier of the two to read. [Frank Kooistra]