Thinner Than Thou (Alex Awards (Awards)) [Hardcover]

You know, when I saw this book I was really intrigued by the premise. Science fiction where the premise is a dystopian future that values body image above--almost to the exclusion of--everything else. Too fat or too thin, and you get locked up until the "problem" gets resolved.

I was excited to read this book. Unfortunately, by page ten, I was rolling my eyes.

This is a bad book. And it's bad on multiple levels. First of all, it's preachy as hell. And I say that as someone who, initially, agreed with Reed's premise (i.e., our nation's focus on body image is destructive). When you're preaching to the choir, and the choir is yawning and rolling their eyes? You're too preachy.

Second, Reed has a love affair with exclamation points and present tense in this book. Neither is a healthy relationship. The dialogue... well... I can tell that she's trying to go for ultra realistic dialogue, but here's the thing. Ultra realistic dialogue makes for horrible prose. Rendering every vocal pause, every 'um', every 'like', does not make your writing interesting. Want proof? "...We pay through the nose to look better and none of it really works... And every lousy bit of originated here. It's also. Agh. Ah." The woman is grieving. She can hardly get out the words. When she does they come up like a little fusillade of hair balls. "Ack. The endgame phase of Solutions is here."This is a major dramatic moment in the book, and I spent it trying to figure out if the 'agh' was supposed to be back in the throat or farther forward. And also? 'Ack' will kill any dramatic tension around it.

Also, for a book that purports to be so body image positive, her portrayals of fat characters are absolutely appalling. Enraging, even. The character for whom we're supposed to have the most sympathy is an anorexic teenager. We're supposed to resent the people who are force-feeding her, resent anyone trying to 'cure' her. The fat characters, without a single exception, are presented as every negative stereotype you can think of--the literary equivalent of those horrible stock neck-down shots that accompany every news story about obesity. The fat characters are all utterly incapable of turning down food, they are helpless before it. When Annie (the anorexic--get it? get it? Annie the Anorexic?) is trying to flee the evil people who are making her eat, a fat girl named Kelly accompanies her (although, of course, she can barely walk and slows our heroine down). Kelly, although her life is in danger, absolutely has to stop and take the doughnuts from the sleeping guard. Because she can't resist. Because she's fat. Another fat character winds up in the custody of the evil fitness guru because his mother (whom he lives with, despite being an overwhelmingly successful executive) pushes him into a Barcalounger and flips up the footrest. And of course, he is too fat to get up by himself. I am not denying that people have been immobilized by their size, but you can't tell me that someone who clearly has no other issues as far as mobility is concerned could be turned turtle just by a recliner. This character replaces sex with food, and has some serious mommy issues. Aside from the characterizations, the language Reed uses to describe her fat characters is anything but accepting, and hints at a strong sense of disgust on her part. They don't walk. They waddle. They shuffle. The bigger they are, the less human Reed makes them, and in so doing, undermines her own message.

Finally, her worldbuilding makes absolutely no logical sense. In her world, religion has been literally driven underground by the all-powerful Reverend Earl, fitness guru. The United States government has apparently vanished from the face of the earth, and forget civil rights. All of this in a future so close to our own that people still drive cars and watch DVDs. How could anybody take a look at the world we live in and think for a minute that religion would be banished by fitness in the space of ten to fifteen years? Especially when there are increasing signs of religion combining with fitness? Who needs Reverend Earl and his theories of the "Afterfat" when we have televangelists preaching health and wealth doctrines, when you have diet books coming out that are essentially WWJE (what would Jesus eat)?

This book is so bad and infuriating, I've only just scratched the surface. It's poorly written and was, for me at least, offensive. I think I finished it only out of sheer stubbornness. And because every time I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did.

There, I just saved you 300+ pages of reading.

Maybe it's just that my expectations for "Thinner Than Thou" were so high, there had to be the inevitable backlash. I read the interior flap on this book and was so excited by the description, I greedily devoured it in a day or so. But I probably should have asked for a taster menu.

Okay, enough of the trying to be cute.

Reed has imagination and the skill to back it up. She creates interesting events with quirky characters to grab your attention and hold on tight. Her world-building has a wicked sense of humor; in a dystopia where Thin Is In, teenagers have competitive eating contests instead of drag races, and the televangelist isn't preaching God but a miracle diet complete with the heavenly Afterfat -- an existence where you eat all you want but never gain a pound.

Sound exciting? It is. And if you just look at these aspects, "Thinner" is a very amusing book that delights in poking holes in the mass-media culture that worships heroin chic and plastic-surgery poster girls. But it doesn't hold anything deeper, in terms of social commentary, than any thirteen-year-old girl knows from self-esteem books/articles/classes/after-school specials. And Reed's right -- you should love who you are, regardless of what you look like, and if anybody tries to say you're somehow wrong or disgraceful because of extra pounds you can give them a roundhouse kick with my blessing. But I still wouldn't reccomend this book.

In trying to prove her point with extremes of black and white, Reed wanders into dangerous grey areas. When did conditions like anorexia or morbid obesity become personal statements instead of health problems? Never. They never-ever did. But Reed refuses to address the diseases or dysfunctions that can result from, say, being too heavy to walk, or dropping below eighty pounds. (Reed even has an anorexic girl chowing down on a candy bar after days of starvation, followed by a donut. Do you know what could actually happen if she did that? She could go into a hypoglycemic COMA.) And neither are the girl's psychological problems (leading to her condition) dealt with -- it seems like, according to Reed, she's allowed to do whatever the heck she wants with her body, no matter how unhappy she really is.

And I'm sorry, but that turns my stomach. All of it. Yes, we're too concerned about image. But we're also woefully ignorant of how to make our bodies HAPPY, not just pretty, and Reed's book overlooks that concept entirely. Combine that with a rather lackluster narrative drive (she gives away all the good stuff in the beginning, and the rest rather drags on) and an ending with a shocking 'twist' you can see coming from a hundred pages back, and well...

It's a fun book. It's quirky, it's kooky, it likes to laugh at both itself and the world. But provoking social commentary it is not, and any insights it DOES give are inevitably flawed by Reed's glossing-over of inconvenient facts about basic health and well-being. So smile, but don't take it that seriously.

THINNER THAN THOU may depict a futuristic dystopia, but a great deal of it is uncomfortably close to home as it takes America's obsession with weight and beauty and stretches it only a little to give us a portrait of the horrible place at the end of the highway down which we are now speeding.

With the evolution of such plastic surgery shows as THE SWAN, surgery and liposuction are being touted as acceptable, if not expected processes in every day life. Weight has been an issue in the media since at least the Sixties and with Hollywood stars now starving themselves to create an even thinner ideal, the idea of a normal body has become skewed to the grotesque.

Thinner Than Thou celebrates those who have been forced into these ideals and the torture required to obtain them and, despite crippling disabilities (anorexia, morbid obesity), these heroes have the strength and the will to fight back. Every aspect of America's obsession with food, from self-starvation to eating contests to the everyday torture of talking ourselves out of that extra cookie is explored and celebrated, for this bleak view of the future is taken with a grain of salt and, more importantly, a fabulous sense of humor.

Ms. Reed has long been a spokeswoman for the American Woman, but she may just have been promoted to being the spokeswoman for the American consciousness. A great book.