Big Brother

Summary (from the publisher): For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the “toxic” dishes that he’d savored through their courtship, and spends hours each day to manic cycling. Then, when Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the airport, she doesn’t recognize him. In the years since they’ve seen one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me.

Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much sacrifice we'll make to save single members of our families, and whether it's ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.

Review: I received an Advance Reader Copy from HarperCollins. 

I was intrigued by the premise of Big Brother - Pandora, owner of a highly successful business and cooking aficionado, sees her brother Edison for the first time after many years only to learn that he is now morbidly obese. After two months of Edison crashing with Pandora, her husband Fletcher, and Pandora's two stepchildren, Pandora decides to move in with Edison and help him lose weight rather than send him back to New York City with empty pockets and a deadly addiction to weight. Obesity is a huge issue in our society and is rarely referenced in fiction. 

My first problem with this book is that I do not care for the writing style. Pandora narrates the book in first person, and she is long winded and much of what she relays is superfluous. Also, the first person angle allows her to go of on lengthy tangents about weight, dieting, the duty to her family, etc. In addition to my distaste for the narration, I don't like any of these characters. Fletcher, Pandora's husband, is a compulsive eater and lives to exercise and is super anal about controlling both his diet and his family. Edison is particularly obnoxious. He lives under the delusion that is a "big cat" in the jazz scene of New York City, "ya dig?" His frequent sayings were obnoxious and his behavior to his family who very generously let him live with him is worse. Additionally, he even goes so far as to blame Pandora for his weight gain, citing her successful business as a self esteem blow that led him to overeat. That's so unfair and displays an unhealthy jealousy that made me dislike him all the more. I was particularly turned off by both Fletcher and Edison when they get in an argument over a broken piece of furniture and Fletcher lets loose, mocking Edison and saying "I'm sorry my head is fat, my thighs are fat, my fingers and my toes are fat, and even my dick is fat, though my gut is so fat that I haven't actually laid eyes on my dick for the last two years." 

After reading an article interviewing the author regarding this book, it all makes a lot more sense. Shriver's brother died after complications with obesity, and in the article, she wonders if she could have sacrificed and worked with him to try to help him gain weight. In that sense, this whole novel is a fictional "what if" fueled by grief for her brother. The problem is, the whole plot of this book is implausible. I don't believe that Pandora would leave her husband and kids to live with her brother, who she's not even that close to. I don't believe he would try or actually manage to lose 225 pounds in a year. That's ridiculously unhealthy, in any case. Furthermore, Pandora's and Edison's weight loss method - little powder packets they mix and drink four times a day is so unhealthy. I couldn't believe that Shriver, who is trying to advocate for the risks of obesity and extreme weight loss, would have the characters undergo such an unhealthy method of losing weight.

I was also annoyed by the overwhelming agenda of this book. It's a soapbox for the author to talk about the social issues of weight through Pandora's voice. It's scarcely thinly veiled. In fact, it's hard to focus on the plot because of Pandora's frequent soliloquies on weight, social stigma, how hard women are on themselves, etc; "All right, I'm ashamed of this. I don't know if this heightened concern for size was done to me or is something I have done to myself. What I do know: (1) I am not the only one who appraises their photographs with exactly the same eye; (2) the folks who also "weigh up" pictures of themselves are not all women." I couldn't help but wonder if Shriver would have been better off just writing a memoir about her brother and speaking directly to the reader about weight since she basically does that in this novel anyway.

I do think Shriver is tackling a very worthy topic and is making readers confront something that is very prominent in our society. Additionally, I liked that she not only touches on morbid obesity, but has Pandora go too far in her own diet so that friends have to step in and tell her she is gaunt and underweight. Although implausibly executed, its a frequent problem in our society. Additionally, I was surprised by the ending of the novel, and it almost made me bump this up to 3 stars. Almost. 

Stars: 2