What, you ask, have I been doing the last few days? Well, not reading classics.  I read a bad mystery novel that left a bad taste in my mouth.  I paged through Padma Lakshmi’s cookbook which made me miss bacon (;vegetarianism is difficult only when one is confronted with a dish laced with or wrapped in or accompanied by bacon.)  And then I read The Afterlife Diet.  

NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater is a prolific children’s writer (”chapter books”, as the small ones call them).  I know this because I shelve his 3,840,000 kids’ books pretty often at the library.  I guess he’s popular.  

I recently heard about this book he wrote for grown-ups called The Afterlife Diet, which the reviewer said had flavors of Vonnegut.  It is a satire of the diet industry, and though all of his characters eat far more prodigiously than any fat person I have ever known (or been), Pinkwater still manages to not be offensive, is kind of hilarious at times and includes a little body acceptance 101 for the uninitiated (see: Shapely Prose at kateharding.net for a primer). Pinkwater inserts these facts and statistics in such a way that, if you didn’t know they were true, you’d just think they were entertainment.  There’s a doctor who tells one character that his blood tests are all good, that he is fit as a fiddle; the patient responds, “But I should lose weight, right?”  The doctor keeps telling him that there is no need to lose weight, that he is well and healthy.  The doctor tells him that he could stand to cut down on the cigarettes, get more exercise, eat more vegetables, but not worry about weight at all since it is a non-issue when it comes to health. The patient says that health without thinness just wouldn’t be enough. Moral of the joke?  The weight loss industry is about aesthetics, not arteries.   

So, the premise is that this kind of selfish, scoundrelly guy called Milton is killed and goes to the afterlife, where it seems that everyone is as fat or fatter than he is.  At one point, Milton thinks it would be a good idea to start a diet club in the afterlife.  I won’t tell you how it turns out. Throughout, we bounce back and forth in time between the life and death of this dude, who appears to be at the center of this strange sci-fi conspiracy but is so distracted by his constant dieting that he doesn’t know what’s going on half the time, and the other half he’s being disingenuous or downright obnoxious, which eventually leads to his death.

In the most brilliant scene, Milton postulates to his shrink that his fat is an insulator, a barrier between himself and emotional threat and/or attachment.  Psychologist Plotkin, the voice of reason and a primary consumer of mass quantities of food (this guy could be the older brother of Ignatius J. Reilly) says, “No. It is not so. The reason you’re fat is that you’re fat.  That’s all. You’re fat for the same reason people have big noses, or red hair.  It’s one of the shapes people come in.  It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

The cast of characters is extensive and various: there are the self-loathing, the self-loving, the literary, the bizarre, the kind, the vile, the duped, the dumped; there’s a weight loss guru who won’t allow her large son to diet because it’s unhealhty, there’s a weight loss guru who hires someone to play him in the commercials because he’s actually quite rotund, there’s a weight loss guru who uses principles he learned during his work in concentration camps to starve his patients to thinness, there’s a weight loss guru who injects people with water and tells them to binge every third month and then go back on the 500 calorie diet in perpetuity.

I won’t go so far as to say that this is destined to be a classic, but it was a good read, a nice break from the literary stylings of Mr. Jas Joyce.  It’s not a classic, so it doesn’t count in the project, but it was a necessary diversion before diving back into Ulysses, as I did today and plan to do on my day off tomorrow.  It’s supposed to rain, so I’m staying in with Leopold Bloom and S. Dedalus for more brilliant headnoise.  Hopefully it will elicit a little of my own brilliant (or at least semi-literate) headnoise.