“She slips me an extra slice of toast,” he writes of the waitress in his local diner, “heavily buttered. His love of fat is comprehensive, from the pleasure of plump olives to the sweet power of Jessye Norman, from 18th-century fat (“The creamy skin of those large dollops of pink women,” begins his hymn of praise to a Boucher painting) to the ultra-modern. Later, he stops exploring the relationship between power and fat (“It’s not money the rich are afraid to spend, but calories, which are worth more than money”) to ask: “Why are Americans obese? Ask a Frenchman.”Klein’s book isn’t so much an anti-diet book but a pro-fat book, and he worships it with the sensuality of the best cookery writers. “Once you have consumed it, the text should vanish, and remain a delicious memory, like the faint recurrence of the feeling of well-being that accompanies the disappearance into your mouth of a chocolate truffle.”Thus Klein (who weighs 200lb) breaks off from expressing rage at the word obesity to write about his fat mom and fat sister: “They’ve both been dieting for decades…and have been getting fatter and fatter.” He explores Fat Admiring sexual subcultures, from the endlessly frustrated Chubby Chasers (“They are looking for fat women [like glamour model Teighlor, who once weighed 719lb] with self-esteem, who love themselves fat”) to the happier gay world of Flabio and Bulk Male. He aims to charm, not shock, the reader into giving up diets “This book is designed to be thrown away,” he writes. Klein, a professor of French at Cornell University who once rode in a car with Roland Barthes, declares Eat Fat to be a “postmodern” diet book, lo on angry sexual politics, hi on fun. Eat Fat by Richard Klein covers much of the same ground: the historical rarity of the emaciated ideal; the greed of the medical-health-beauty industry; the damage that dieting can do to the body; and the scary new generation of “anti-obesity” drugs.What is new about this book is, in part, its tone.
A few hours after I met the nutrionist, I ate four slices of walnut cake.The other growth area is the anti-diet book, a genre pioneered by Susie Orbach in the 1970s with Fat Is A Feminist Issue. Alan Martello, an Angry Young Man turned literary patriarch and father of the murdered girl, blubs and blusters through the narrative like King Lear played by Kingsley Amis. Dramatis personae are quirky without falling into caricature. The idea of sitting down and writing a novel with one’s spouse is too intriguing to ignore and this reader, at least, was plagued with fantasies of the writers engaging in unseemly spats about whose turn it is to do the pagination or who has prior claim on the wave-washed shore analogy.The authors have disdained the obvious cop-outs of a dual perspective or time-slip narrative and the writing in The Memory Game is commendably even, the shared style exact and unshowy. Most couples cannot manage a Sainsbury’s run a deux without recourse to Relate.
The red herrings at every turn are evolved and involving stories in their own right, prompting seductive notions of parallel truths, and the ending is properly unguessable.The sheer breadth of the material and the quality of finish would be impressive in any fictional debut, and the well-publicised fact that “Nicci French” is actually the husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French is almost irrelevant Almost, but not quite. But do reliable sorts necessarily make reliable narrators? Can a sane and honest person bear false witness? This is the question at the heart of The Memory Game, a remarkable first novel by Nicci French.A thoroughly contemporary thriller, it takes stock elements of the genre (unreliable narrator/revelation through analysis) and stretches them to their philosophical limits. From the first page Jane, sensible, sensitive and wry, has our absolute confidence. The family is her fulcrum and refuge.
So when, in the aftershock of Natalie’s exhumation, Jane turns sleuth and directs her murder investigation to the very heart of the family, the reader is as shocked as the Martellos. When Jane marries Claud, Natalie’s elder brother, she becomes enmeshed in Martello mythology. Natalie, a beautiful and brilliant 16-year old, disappeared in 1969, when she and Jane were best friends.
When the body of her sister- in-law, Natalie, is dug up in the garden of the family home, Jane is the one who serves up risotto and sympathy to the glamorous Martello clan. The Memory Game by Nicci French, Heinemann, pounds 14.99
Jane Martello is a reliable sort. A few days later, a nutrionist urged me to give up wheat, oats, rye, barley, dairy products, sugar, salt, tea, coffee, chocolate and, of course, alcohol.
The new ideology – emphasising health, not weight loss – may be different from the old, but the advice is the same: contradictory, ever-changing and impossibly austere. Last week, I met a German doctor who advised me to begin a “low acid” eating programme, avoiding rhubarb, wild cherries, gooseberries, yoghurt, sauerkraut, vinegar, vitamin C, margarine and meat. Instead of calorie counting, everyone is “eating for health”: food combining, the anti-candida system, allergy eradication attempts.
