Mum brought this back
from the library while I was at home for a two-week university holiday and I’m
SO glad she chose it – this is probably the best book I’ve read in 2014 so far.
Lionel Shriver
provides an emotional and often shocking account of the obesity crisis in
America through an autobiographical perspective.
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| Credit: Goodreads |
Pandora, based loosely on
Shriver herself, is a successful businesswoman meandering through an
unremarkable routine and a middle-of-the-road marriage to obsessive,
health-conscious Fletcher. When her brother Edison, a formerly successful jazz
musician comes back into her Iowa life, hundreds of pounds heavier than when
she last saw him, his obesity has an incredible and immediate impact on her
marriage, family, household and state of mind. Pandora sacrifices all she has
worked for to try and help her brother, implementing an extreme weight-loss
regime and moving out of her marital home to give around-the-clock support.
But behind Edison’s
obesity lies a cycle of depression and instability. Some reviews I’ve read have
criticised Shriver’s characterisation and depiction of overeating and the problems
attached to it, but personally I found the graphic and grotesque descriptions
convincing and poignant. You feel like you need to find out whether Pandora and
Edison are successful in their mission to get Edison back to his original size,
and in that way Shriver held my attention for the duration of the novel.
Most importantly,
reading this made me really think about our relationship with food – how we
base our day to day lives around it, use it to celebrate and commemorate and
enjoy, but on the other side of the coin, how the very thing that we depend on
for sustenance can be wholly destructive. This is invoked from the outset when
Shriver writes:
"I have to wonder whether any of the true
highlights of my forty some years have had to do with food. I don't mean
celebratory dinners, good fellowship; I mean salivation, mastication and
peristalsis."
This sentence put the idea of obesity and why so
many people overeat to an extreme degree in a new perspective and this idea is
one that is emphasised throughout the rest of the novel.
Big Brother conveys an important message as obesity is undoubtedly one of the
biggest problems for health and society of our time, particularly in the
Western world. Shriver’s writing is nuanced, careful and gripping and in my
opinion reveals something about why humans eat to excess and the rebounding
consequences.
