A Review of: Rag, by Maryse Meijer

Format: 160 pp., paperback; Size: 5.2 x 7.4 in.; Price: $15.00; Publisher: FSG Originals; Representative passage: “He steps around the body and its shadow of blood. The head, where’s the head? He leans closer: some kind of mashed in. Pulverized. But it’s all here. Kneeling, he sniffs, pokes, prods, guesses, wonders, looks. A bit of brain like putty dried on the oven door. One of the cops whistles. The detective stands. Peeling off gloves, giving orders pages of notepads flickering. Making the usual jokes. He turns his back on the other guys, rubs his eyes. Somehow he is expected not to go crazy. Blood even on the flowered wallpaper.”

Central Question: Where is the line between fascination and disgust?

Maryse Meijer’s collection, Rag is a bloody assemblage of violent tales as entrancing as it is gory, as spellbinding as horrifying. As the world struggles to contend with toxic male rage in 2019, as manifestos and live-streamed acts of misogynist violence fill our feeds, Meijer’s work takes on unique import. She writes mostly about male violence from an unflappable distance that indicts not only her characters, but her readers. As we read, we become keenly aware of our own complicity in the societal structures that allow male obsession and the projection of female fecklessness to flourish.

Meijer—author of the 2016 collection, Heartbreaker, and 2018 novella, Northwood—critiques the male gaze by examining how its fetishistic relationship to female bodies subjects women to harassment, humiliation, and murder. In representing the male gaze, the author also turns her attention to the indistinct border between love—or what passes for it in our minsogynst society—and harmful fixation. Her characters are gluttonous consumers who wantonly indulge primal cravings: students fall for their teachers, a detective obsesses over a female killer, and pizza parlor workers become preoccupied with their customers, among other tales. In exploring these obsessions, Meijer’s tales of fixation are studies in destructive desire—especially the way that gender inequities allow men to consume women rather than to consider them as people. This imbalance of power undermines women’s agency over their own bodies and fates, and as we read these stories, our enjoyment of them implicates us in this violence.     

Meijer’s characters act with lusty disregard; they allow their aberrant passions to consume others, and are consumed in turn by their own desires. Their urges become needs, and many characters confuse proximity, attention, and food for love. One story, “Alice,” examines a father’s lack of control in a marriage characterized by extreme bean-counting. His wife Wendy indulges his daughter Alice to excess even as she restricts what she...