Richard Klein (1) (1941–)

I guess this book isn't really written for me, so don't attach too much weight to that relatively low rating--it might tap into a more emotional place if I'd spent more of my life struggling to feel good about my weight, and certainly Klein's oft-repeated clarion to "EAT FAT", like choosing life except with more whipped cream, is stirring and admirable in that 90s leftist identity politics way that I sometimes feel we abandoned too soon. Certainly a book like this gives anyone and everyone a chance to chiggidy-check themselves and say "What is my relationship with food and my body, right now? Is it fundamentally one of joy?" And for me, making the transition from my sylphlike 20s to what looks to be a trim-but-sleek 30s, like a sea otter or something, it inspired me to EAT FAT a big pile of eggs and sausage and gouda and bread and olives and mikans and pu-erh and Chartreuse, and made that October feast kind of memorable and celebratory.


The rest of this is kind of paint-by-numbers--it's always interesting to do the etymology thing, but it's also the most obvious approach to any topic when you don't really have much to say about it but do have a book contract. Fat, vat, (bier vom) Fass, and thus fasten and hold fast, as well as meanings of grasping and taking and using. Your fat is a weapon and an armour and an ally.


But Klein is a bad writer, and the diet-industry silver-bullet corruption and nerve-damage from "dex" and anal leakage from Olestra stuff is bonegrindingly hard to get through as well as being over familiar already (though I should say the book was written in 1996). Woulda made a better Harper's piece. And the stuff about changing fashions is interesting but nuanceless, and Klein comes a bit too close a bit too many times to going "thin people are just creepy!" And it's a laugh his big crush on Bill Clinton, just a lonely fatherless boy who eats to feel good,and it's way funny that he was like "If he was having affairs the press would be all over that but with the eating they spare his dignity", in light of what happened.


But the thing is, I just can't accept that the guy's a professor of French literature writing about fat and he only mentions Gargantua once in 200-odd pages. Fuck Falstaff and your fat Hamlet (interesting that fat Hamlet was once a thing, though, in light of the fact that now we get muscular and waif princes only); if we really loved fat we'd make a model of Rabelais's eighteen-chinned giant out of ham hocks and pate and make it our centrepiece or king.… (more)