The many faces of Appetite

It is difficult to go hard on a book that opens with quotes from the dearly departed Bray Wyatt and my favourite anxiety inducer, The Bear. 

After all, an opening epigraph is really just a writer's way of telling you who they think they're talking to — and pairing a deceased pro wrestler with a show about a chef's meltdown is its own small act of self-definition. It's a strange, slightly cheeky handshake before the book gets down to business, and it turns out to be a fitting one 

There is a particular kind of hunger that immigrant fiction returns to again and again: the hunger to be seen, to be named correctly, to matter on one's own terms rather than someone else's. P. Paramita's debut novel, Appetite, wears this hunger literally — its protagonist is a cook — but the book is far more interested in the appetite for recognition than the appetite for food, even as it lavishes attention on both.

Zarina works the prep station at Zero's, an upscale New Haven restaurant where she is, by her own account, underpaid, overworked, and functionally invisible. Off the clock, she smuggles home the kitchen's leftover Yukon Golds and stray herbs to reimagine the Bangladeshi dishes of her childhood — food that, in her mind, deserves its own unique identity.

There is a particular kind of hunger that immigrant fiction returns to again and again: the hunger to be seen, to be named correctly, to matter on one's own terms rather than someone else's. P. Paramita's debut novel, Appetite, wears this hunger literally. Appetite is a confident, warm, occasionally very funny debut that understands its two subcultures — the restaurant back-of-house and the wrestling ring — well enough to use them as more than backdrop, and it treats Bangladeshi food with a precision that will surprise readers used to seeing it flattened into "South Asian" cuisine.

Her other refuge is professional wrestling, and specifically Sierra Myst, a dazzling, dominant heel Zarina has idolised from a distance for years. When an offhand post about one of Sierra's matches draws an actual reply from the wrestler herself, Zarina's ordinary life tips into something closer to a fairy tale — until the fairy tale reveals its costs.

The novel's great strength is its refusal to treat its two central obsessions — restaurant kitchens and wrestling arenas — as odd-couple novelty. Both are, in Paramita's hands, arenas of performance: places where people labour invisibly so that a spectacle can appear effortless, where hierarchy is enforced through humiliation dressed up as tradition, and where the line between authentic self and character is porous at best. 

Zarina's fluency in both worlds gives the book its structural intelligence. She understands intuitively that Sierra Myst, the swaggering heel, is a role somebody built — because she has watched line cooks build similar roles for themselves every night at Zero's.

The food writing, unsurprisingly, is the book's most notable virtue. Paramita writes dishes as memory rather than menu, so that a description of garlic-roasted potatoes or a family curry recipe becomes a way of narrating displacement without ever using the word. 

For Bangladeshi readers in particular, there is something quietly moving in watching a novel insist, patiently and without apology, that "Bangladeshi" is a cuisine in its own right and not a subset of something larger.

The novel's back half, which follows Zarina's friendship with Sierra as it curdles from mutual admiration into one-sided service — unpaid confidante, unpaid assistant, unpaid audience — is where Appetite is most genuinely uncomfortable, and best. 

Paramita is sharp on the specific mechanics of parasocial intimacy: how access can feel like intimacy, how being needed by someone powerful can feel indistinguishable from being valued. There is a racial and class charge running under this dynamic, and the novel does earn credit for examining that imbalance without turning either woman into a simple villain or victim.

Reviewers describe the novel's first seventy percent as slow-going, "tell" rather than "show," followed by a third act that resolves far too quickly and with almost no real cost to anyone. As one reviewer describes it, the book left her hungering for more rather than satisfied.  

The Sierra–Zarina friendship seems slightly rushed at exactly the point it should have been given room to breathe, and as someone who has followed professional wrestling for a long time felt the novel's early stretches of wrestling exposition read like a Wikipedia entry rather than a lived-in world, but for the uninitiated it might just be what the doctor ordered.

One recurring criticism is about Zarina herself. Many readers have found her prickly and inconsistently judgemental — quick to mock a straight-laced male fan as "performative" while extending Sierra, her idol, near-total benefit of the doubt — and a few flagged the prose's tendency toward on-the-nose social commentary, the kind of line that explains a theme instead of dramatising it. 

Overall Appetite is a confident, warm, occasionally very funny debut that understands its two subcultures — the restaurant back-of-house and the wrestling ring — well enough to use them as more than backdrop, and it treats Bangladeshi food with a precision that will surprise readers used to seeing it flattened into "South Asian" cuisine. 

Readers coming to it fresh should expect an American immigrant novel in structure and pacing — brisk, hook-driven, built for a market that rewards propulsion — with a soft landing that undercuts some of its own tension. 

As a portrait of what we owe the people we admire, and what it costs to keep feeding someone else's hunger before your own, it is still well worth the appetite it asks of its reader.