Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews
Review by Jessie Jones
It’s very rare in my reading that I’d describe a novel, or any work of literature, as ‘insatiable.’ Something that feels greedy, rapacious, in its demand for both your attention and the full spectrum of your emotional intellect.
How appropriate, then, that Jessica Andrews’ second novel, Milk Teeth, (the follow-up to her much-lauded 2019 debut Saltwater) can be described in such a way. Concerned as it is with want and hunger, in all manifestations, each part of this novel represents the whole. Each sentence acts as a synecdoche, each turn at the macro level. encouraging you to recast what you’ve already read on the micro level. The story follows a (nameless) working class narrator recovering slowly, and at times haltingly, from an eating disorder. But it’s not just about that. We meet her late into this process, as she grapples with it during the development of a new relationship. But it’s not just about that either. She’s meandered from job to job, much like a down to earth version of Plath’s fig tree, charading a lifestyle beyond her means in various settings. Her equally nameless lover is an academic who, soon after meeting her, is offered a position in Barcelona.
All of this on paper feels very familiar. But that tautness of the language creates a push pull dynamic that transforms the novel into an incredibly astute, original take: how she reads eating disorders through class. As Helen Gremillion has noted, anorexia nervosa has ‘been described almost exclusively as a white, middle-class phenomenon’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Where one sense of denial in a socio-economic context is foisted upon the protagonist, the answer is often controlling the only thing one can: one’s body.
The narrator comes from Bishop Aukland, a market town surrounded by collieries in the North East, and the narrative perpetually flits back to these beginnings. The unrest of the speaker is reflected in the prose as it traces her physical and emotional nomadism, returning to her childhood memories. Place, by virtue of class and vice versa, becomes how her disorder is read.
A sense of hunger and desire starts here, in her hometown, as she describes how she ‘wanted sensation, to go out in the world and let it rip through me’. This is something that she’ll return to, again and again, contemplating the agency with which she fled her surroundings. She tells us that she ‘didn’t know what to do with all that want as it swelled in me like a river’, and the novel very much reads like a rumination on this dilemma. This is reflected most expertly when other people’s relationship to food and work go hand in hand. Our protagonist observes the other freelancers she works with, sipping coffee, eating expensive pastries, complaining about their treatment in a banal, half hearted manner. Comparing herself to the others she observes ‘the way they wanted so openly, without trying to hide it.’ This is because, unlike her own, ‘their needs were thoughtless because they had the means to meet them.’
The novel is full of these astute, powerful, gut-wrenching overviews in which the protagonist cements her alien-ness whilst creating a sense of collaborative, uncomfortable marriage between privilege and consumption. The narrator’s resentment towards her hunger is due to its uncontrollability, its unquenchability. It’s easy to feel like hunger is the enemy when you’re unsure if, how, or when it will be satiated.
Andrews does here what so few manage with this subject matter. Rather than just a voyeuristic description of a skipped meal, a pale complexion, or a rogue and jutting collarbone, there’s a liveliness and a reality here that’s explored in the same way it’s lived by its protagonist: overwhelmingly. There’s a delicate balance throughout the novel between the tight, restrictive control of the protagonist and the indulgence she’s attempting to embrace. This is reflected in the language, each sentence feeling like a bevy of sensation without a single word wasted. If I had to give this novel one word, it would be: sensual. You can hear the sounds of the various city environments; you can feel the somehow simultaneous discomfort and ecstasy of being embodied; most of all, the descriptions of food are so palpable as to be some of the standout linguistic passages.
So much of what we need to know about this book is in its title. Milk Teeth does indeed tell the story of a woman extricating a younger version of herself in order to grow a new one. She fluctuates between a frenetic tasting of the world around her and a consequential clenching of the jaw. Linguistically, this is reflected in an oscillation between sensational, luscious prose and a clipped, stark restriction. One minute we’ll get a paragraph, replete with commas and sensory indulgence: ‘you pass me a glass thick with black wine, your skin slick with pepper and sweat, rimmed in the blue glow of the gas cooker.’ However, sentences get shorter, more restrained, when they describe her denial: ‘you reach out your hand. You look like a child for a moment and I smile and offer you my plate. [...] My stomach rumbles and I press my hands into it to make it stop.’
For a novel that is so sharp and often written with such linguistic utility, it isn’t at all sparse. Despite these moments in which the narration is given the control that the narrator so desires, this novel is full. In fact, fittingly, one might say it has real weight.