It opens with a short treatise on the meaning of eating: 'I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. Her pain is most legible in the failings of the novel, which are legion.

Inevitably, the guilt at having been so helpless screams off the pages of this book in a way that evokes sympathy for the author in inverse proportion to that which it conjures for its characters. but he's also, sadly, a good test case for the claim that one can be 'healthy at every size'.' (He died of a cardiac arrest the same day.) Some part of her sense of helplessness is discernible in the fact that she would write this at all you don't air your dirty laundry in public unless you've given up on whatever apparatus you had in your utility room. It would be pointless to deny the knowledge of some biographical detail, here – the author herself had a brother, whose death she prefigured by hours in an article for the Guardian, writing: 'My brother breaks my heart. 'Back then, I hadn't the wisdom to welcome such minor discord, since Fletcher's alarm-clock setting would soon be the least of our problems.' No, her one and only problem is her penniless and morbidly obese brother, arriving at the novel's beginning after a four‑year absence. Curiously, the marriage itself never troubles the protagonist, beyond some spousal kvetching followed swiftly by classic, Shriverian foreboding.

An explanation offered after a calamity – 'you make my wife cry, and I don't like it' – sounds tinny and baseless, since he gives no outward sign of caring whether his wife cries or not. The couple exist in a hamster wheel of self-righteous competitiveness (who got up earliest, who ate the least, who cycles the fastest) that abates only once in the novel, as they commiserate with one another over the sudden, undesired proximity of Edison, Pandora's brother, whose obesity disgusts them more profoundly than I could comprehend.Ī sudden death wish, pursued through the medium of fried foods, could be very distressing to watch in a sibling but as for Fletcher he is merely the brother-in-law, doesn't even like the guy, and despises Edison for his weakness. P andora Halfdanarson is fortyish, an improbably successful businesswoman, stepmother to two teenagers, living in a desiccated marriage to Fletcher.

Big brother shriver