I'm home at present, with some grotty virus, so before I watch another movie, and do some more knitting, I'll write a bit, including comments on the books from my last post. I'll polish those off first.
1. Four seasons: a year of Italian food. Well, I didn't do 10 recipes - I did three. Two will definitely get made again, the eggplant slices wrapped around mozzarella, although I will bake not fry the eggplant slices. Too oily. The other was a hazelnut praline semifreddo which was very yum, even without the hazelnut liqueur. I just need to get better at unmolding things. But it was certainly easy to identify recipes I wanted to make, and could see myself making. A cookbook to be owned, so that you can work through it at your own pace.
2 and 3. The wedding wallah and Moon over Soho were very enjoyable. Definitely recommend in the romance and detective genres and will hunt down the authors' other titles.
4, 5, and 6. Didn't get to. I borrow far more than I read, and always will. I think of it as a shopping spree where I can return things with no questions.
Ok, that's them out the way. Now on to the book I really want to write about. Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver.
Big Brother is narrated by Pandora, a 40ish married-with-stepkids businesswoman. The Big Brother is her older brother Edison, a self-aggrandizing but down on his luck jazz musician. At a particularly low point, she agrees to allow him to stay, over the objections of her husband Fletcher, who loathes the guy. She hasn't seen her brother in several years, and is devastated when at the airport she discovers he has gained weight. Like over 200 pounds.
The rest of the book is a meaty consideration of sibling issues, dieting issues, food issues, and I have to say that I read the book in about two days. I find her compulsive reading. But I found her writing about weight and dieting to be both jarring and fascinating. Her depiction of everyone's repulsed reaction to the new, fat Edison seems both sadly plausible and slightly hysterical, and this reaction occurs before anyone has any idea why Edison has become so fat. It turns out that Edison is a compulsive eater, gorging himself on enormous amounts of food. (The fact that Fletcher is a health puritan does make this conflict entertaining as well.) And Edison is described as disgusting. Not just his body, but the mess he leaves behind in the kitchen. The culmination of this 'fat Edison is disgusting' comes when Edison finally confesses that his career is completely washed up and he has nowhere to go once he leaves his sister's. Fletcher has given her an ultimatum at this point - if Edison stays on past his scheduled flight, their marriage is over.
Hearing a cry from the bathroom, Pandora enters to find:
"The toilet was brimming. Floating on a skim of waste water, turds were scattered all over the floor - under the sink, beside the shower, against the wall of the tub, and dammed at the door, so two balls escaped before I closed it behind me." (p. 153, and sorry if anyone was eating)
Is a bowel movement like this even possible? Anyway - this is a man at a low ebb, hitting rock bottom in classic alcoholic-before-rehab style.
On the other hand, because Shriver is an intelligent woman, she can reflect on our culture's bizarre and obsessive reaction to weight and size, for instance:
"Ever since Edison gave me cause to, I've made a study of this: the hierarchy of apprehensions when laying eyes on another person. Once a form emerges from the distance that is clearly a human and not a lamppost, we now log 1) gender, 2) size. This order of recognition may be universal in my part of the world, though I do not believe 'size' has always been number two. Yet these days I am apt to register that a figure is slight or fat even before I pick up a nanosecond later that they are white, Hispanic, or black." (p. 139-40)
In the second part of the novel, Pandora stages an intervention with Edison and offers to rent an apartment and live with him while he loses weight, as long he doesn't cheat at all. This part of the novel , for me, read as if it had been written by someone who had never dieted, and actually didn't know that much about the process. The third part of the novel (which I won't give away) gives an indication of why this is so, but it's still very discordant to anyone who knows anything about weight loss or dieting. Edison is able to go from binging on anything available including wheatgerm to a 500 cal a day liquid diet for 6 months, and only cheats once. And without having to be hospitalized? And the doctor they see at the beginning has no objection to a 500cal diet? I'm still not sure how much to see these, and other, aspects of part 2 as a failure on Shriver's part, or whether they were deliberate.
Equally bizarre is the fact that Pandora sees weight as the only thing that needs to be 'fixed' about Edison, or maybe she believes it's the thing that will solve all his other problems - his lying, his lack of responsibility, his lack of motivation, his addictive behaviour. If anyone is crying out for therapy, it's Edison. But again, there are perceptive descriptions of the feelings of superiority of the successful dieter, plus the recognition that achieving weight loss can be a hollow victory.
Perhaps it's a case of actions speaking louder than words - the author's disgust with obesity not being able to counteract the other intelligent points in the novel. Which the author (through her narrator) admits to as well:
"I scoffed at Fletcher's association of physique with vice and virtue, but I bought into the same equivalence myself." (p. 137)
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