In Lionel Shriverâs new novel, Big Brother, a middle-aged woman living in the Midwest welcomes her adored older brother for a visit from New York City. When Pandora arrives at the airport to pick Edison up, though, she doesnât recognize him, the couple hundred pounds heâs gained since their last meeting obscuring his long-familiar traits. Recovering from the initial shock, Pandora risks family and sanity to help get her brotherâs weight back under control. Shriver hits on certain themes that have emerged over the past year, as stepping on a scale in America and around the world has become a more fraught experience than ever and fiction has begun to weigh in. In short, obesity is having a literary moment.

Itâs been a long time coming. âObesity among Americans is a major public health problem that is bound to get worse as the nation eats more and exercises less,â The New York Times reported all the way back in 1966. But even as the obesity rate was rising steadily to its current rate of 35 percent, adding an eventual $190 billion to annual health-care costs, our sympathies lagged behind the emerging epidemic. In literature as in life, fat people were still there to be made fun of.
Case in point: the prototypical modern overweight protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Tooleâs A Confederacy of Dunces and âa slovenly and ranting fatso,â as Alan Friedman described him in his 1980 review for the Times. Indeed, the novelâs opening sentence describes his âfleshy balloon of a head,â and takes it from there. Ignatius is clever and intuitive, but also careless and cruel. His weight is a source not of anguish but physical comedy, his constant belching and bellowing and lumbering off further the novelâs mordant sense of satire.
With Dunces, novelists found a template for the fat protagonist. Subsequent variations include the 325-pound Misha Vainberg in Gary Shteyngartâs 2006 novel Absurdistan, who indulges in all manner of excess while trapped in a Third World country, gallivanting about the nationâs expat centers and generally making a happy fool of himself. And in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diazâs 2007 novel, the titular characterâs fatness aligns with his interest in comic books and science fiction, along with a painful performance around girls.
Of these characters, only Diazâs Oscar is really bothered by his weight, although only with regard to how the opposite sex reacts to it. And regardless, for all of them obesity is not the main point but is used to signal something else defective in their characters. The medical, financial, and emotional realities of obesity never impose on them. None of them ever goes on a serious diet nor is urged to. Such characters have long existed as foils in literature, of courseâfrom Shakespeareâs Falstaff to myriad Dickensian characters, back when the reigning collective view held that obesity was not a societal ill but the harmless pickle of a few unfortunate individuals. Yesteryearâs obese characters could be evil or jovial, but either way they tended toward caricature.
Our understanding of obesity had come a long way by the time the Ignatius Reillys of literature appeared, but that understanding didnât translate into a balanced portrayal of obese characters. Their only progress, in fact, was marked by a move to central protagonists after a centuries-long run as side players. Even the odd novel that humanized obesity, like Wally Lambâs Sheâs Come Undone in 1992, presented weight gain and loss as just one element in a larger story, one more hurdle to overcome on the road to triumph.
That is, until the last year or so, which has brought a dramatic shift in the portrayal of obesity in fiction. Itâs like our nationâs novelists needed to watch a few seasons of The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss competition show that debuted in 2004, in order to develop a sense of the anguish that can accompany great heft. David Whitehouseâs 2011 novel Bed gave a precursor of what was to come, with a character who intentionally becomes the fattest man in the world, seemingly as a publicity stunt. But the first work truly in the new vein came in January 2012 with Liz Mooreâs Heft, a compassionate treatment of a man who weighs more than 500 pounds and hasnât left his home for 10 years. Michael Kimballâs Big Ray, about a man coming to terms with his obese fatherâs death, soon followed. Then, near the end of the year, Jami Attenbergâs The Middlesteins appeared to widespread acclaim. Attenbergâs protagonist, Edie Middlestein, weighs in at over 300 pounds, with the consequences of her overeating already apparent and unraveling her family.
The arrival of Shriverâs Big Brother this week confirms this new type of obese protagonist. Like its predecessors, it teems with sympathy for not only its obese character, but also the havoc his condition wreaks on those who love him. Shriver endeavors to capture the psychology behind Edisonâs extreme weight gain, both from his perspective and from his sisterâs. âYeah, I used to look pretty good. Then I didnât,â explains big brother Edison. âThatâs the point. Once I got sort of fat, one more baby-back didnât matter.â Pandora, for her part, muses, âFat itself was depressing, which made him fatter.â
This recent wave of novels may or may not serve as a reflection of our changing attitudes toward obesity. Research shows that despite the growing seriousness of the epidemic, American society as a whole still tends to stigmatize obesity. And certainly, acceptance is not a straightforward goal: we donât want merely to learn to live with it, we want to put an end to it, which requires continual resistance. âHaving conspicuously triumphed in the competition for resources, the fleshiest among us are therefore towering biological success stories,â observes Shriverâs Pandora. âBut ask any herd of overpopulating deer: nature punishes success.â That biological success has become a crime against health is an irony worthy of literatureâs current plotlines.