WE can safely begin with chubby chasers. They appear not only in Richard Klein's paean to bulk but also in the indispensable Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices, which tells us the chaser is "someone who is sexually aroused by an obese partner " the chubby. Everyone must find the term and the tendency pleasing at least in a Beryl Cook sort of way. "What stood before me was one of the most gorgeous men I had ever seen," declares the narrator of a big-boy magazine story quoted in EAT FAT. "I tried not to get carried away with the mounds of flesh I found myself suddenly groping and grabbing ... I paid special attention to those large round buttocks that screamed out to be squeezed."
Has Klein, a deconstructionist professor of French at Cornell and author of Cigarettes Are Sublime been carried away with the mounds of flesh? Is he a chaser? Or is he a chubby? Five feet, eight and a half inches and weighing two hundred pounds, he registers himself as statistically obese and accepts he's not happy about it. So now he seeks to "transvalue" fat He claims to have composed "a postmodern diet book" to overthrow the ideal of thinness dominating our century, an ideal that has prompted diets with the same level of nourishment as the inmate regimen in Buchenwald.
Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Hillel Schwartz's Never Satisfied, both quoted admiringly in EAT FAT, have covered this ground before. Klein seeks to rearrange his readers' corporeal expectations by a somewhat haphazard but usually entertaining cultural survey of fat, by a self-confessed "fat layman's" assessment of current scientific arguments and by the method of the book itself. Klein is very keen that one reads the book's title in capitals, with the word EAT directly above the word FAT This typographical mantra repeats itself through the text, in the hope that we will, indeed, EAT FAT for six weeks and, by rejecting the modern rejection of fat, find ourselves in the vanguard of his prediction of "a shift in fashion that once more will make fat beautiful".
Klein returns to this prophecy again and again through an essay that is otherwise low on structure. Despite the joys of its references (Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Rodin's "Balzac", Maupassant's Boule de Suif, Michelangelo's heroic stomachs) and the pleasures of much of the writing ("in the grill is the grease that feeds the diner", Klein writes of his beloved breakfast) EAT FAT feels overextended, uneven and just that bit sloppy. Rather fat, really. The conventional wisdom on fat, as laid out by Klein, demonises those who bear it as ugly, unhealthy and slow. He wants us to think we are rather than have our fat, but the lumbering quality of some of the arguments - for example, he thinks we may go back to eating beef because "humans can only eat so much chicken before they start getting sick of it" - bogs down the elegant central thesis.
Klein's foray into the science of diet treatments reads like straight journalism, with occasional faux-naif apologies for his amateur status. This sits strangely with his more poetic flights on flab idols such as Pavarotti: "I honor his fat, I admire the sacrifice and will required to make his body into the ennobling instrument it is." Or his more locker-room approach to Roseanne, "one fat lady I would not kick out of my bed".
This takes us back to chubby chasers and the idea that the thin-loving conventions of our times are the true aberration and the salivating readers of mags like Fat Girl and Bulk Male sail in the historical mainstream, albeit very low in the water.