We need to talk about morbid obesity

Lionel Shriver is looking at obesity close-up and personal — and she doesn’t like it
Peter Dazeley/ Getty Images
2 May 2013

Big Brother
by Lionel Shriver
(HarperCollins, £16.99)

Food matters to Lionel Shriver. Not just eating but the state of mind that dictates what and how much we eat. In an interview last week she boasted that she herself rarely eats anything before 11pm and that she used to fast for up to three weeks at a time but stopped because it was damaging her health. More poignantly, she wrote an article in 2009 for Standpoint magazine about her morbidly obese older brother. At 5ft 7in and weighing 24 stone, Greg Shriver could barely walk and dragged a portable oxygen tank with him “like a faithful dog”. Chronic pain caused by two accidents left him unable to exercise but still, Shriver conceded, the fact remained that he ate too much. The day she filed her copy her brother had a sudden respiratory crisis and died a few days later in hospital.

Apparently a doctor had told her before he died that Greg was an ideal candidate for bariatric surgery but that he’d need someone to help him recover and it would take a long time. Was Shriver up to that, she’d asked herself, prepared to leave her husband to care for her difficult brother? As it turned out, his death saved her from putting herself to the test but the dilemma has stayed with her and it’s what underpins her hefty new novel, Big Brother. The publishers are flogging it as “Lionel Shriver tackles obesity, the biggest health epidemic facing Western society”, but it’s really more of a semi-fictionalised memoir, the made-up bits being less important than what’s real. Shriver is looking at obesity close-up and personal — and she doesn’t like it.

The storyline is simple enough. Forty-year-old Pandora Halfdanarson lives in a town in Iowa with her husband Fletcher and two teenage stepchildren. She agrees to have her older brother Edison — a jazz musician in New York fallen on hard times — to stay. A former caterer, Pandora now runs a successful business making creepy bespoke dolls and Fletcher is a furniture-maker. She’s a little podgy, he’s a fitness fanatic who cycles everywhere and eats frugally. They haven’t seen Edison for four years so when he arrives at the airport weighing 28 stone, Pandora barely recognises him. His effect on the family is devastating, from breaking Fletcher’s furniture when he sits down to cooking up heart attack brunches, and his presence soon begins to threaten the stability of his sister’s marriage. But in an improbable gesture of self-sacrifice, Pandora offers to let him stay on if he agrees to go on a strict diet. She rents a nearby apartment and, leaving Fletcher to his own devices, moves in with Edison.

Together, brother and sister embark on a binge slimming odyssey, allowing Shriver to indulge in a sustained rant about appetite, addiction, eating and self-control. She describes with zealous insight the self-deceptions, little lies, body dysmorphia, smell of ketosis and the plain disappointment people with eating disorders experience when they try to eat normally. While there are glimpses of empathy and attempts to understand Edison’s compulsive eating, what comes across most powerfully is Pandora’s disgust with food and Fletcher’s loathing of his wife’s “fat fuck lard arse bro”. A chocolate cake leaves “fecal smears of icing”, looking at diet plans makes Pandora feel “soiled”; even the Iowan landscape after a flood is “muted by a putrid, diarrhoeal silt”.

The climax, involving a Chocolate Dump Cake “the size of a small suitcase”, is one of the most painfully brutal I’ve ever read, shocking but brilliant. The fact that it turns out to be a lie and that Pandora is an unreliable narrator doesn’t matter, because the book’s power lies not in its having one big theme but in its obsession over all the little ones.

Unlikeable but compelling.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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