Customer Reviews

The Fat Woman's Joke

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Perhaps there is something about Fay Weldon's style of writing that I am simply unfamiliar with, but I really did not get anything out of this book at all. Except maybe a headache.

I don't usually give bad reviews of things, mostly because if I'm not enjoying something so much I simply stop reading. But this was a short read, less than 200 pages, and so I perservered, waiting for something to happen and for the characters to come to life. But then suddenly it was the end of the book and I was none the wiser as to what the point of it all had been.

I think the key thing that irritated me was the fact that none of the characters in 'The Fat Woman's Joke' are likeable in any respect. They are not nice people: not nice to each other, and not nice to themselves. This in itself is not a flaw - I think a very interesting book could be written about people who continue to act in destructive and unpleasant ways, but this certainly isn't it. The characters had no depth, no complexity, and it was difficult to understand their motivations for how they acted toward one another.

A big part of this is probably the style in which it is written. The book is almost entirely dialogue, jumping (fairly randomly) between two-person conversations to give an overall picture of what happened and when, but there's no context to any of it. And it wasn't its non-linearity which bothered me; I quite like a novel that meanders through and across time. But it struck me about three-quarters of the way through that what I was actually reading was more like a play without any stage direction included. No pauses in conversation, no silences, no facial expressions, no set description, no background - none of the things that make plays work. It might actually work as a stage play, though, but as a novel it reads like a failed experiment and simply falls flat.

I may possibly be being too harsh here, I'm not sure. Perhaps this was not the best introduction to Fay Weldon and I shouldn't judge her work on the strength of this book. Maybe there is some underlying point she is making that has completely escaped me, or maybe the book is dated, but 'The Fat Woman's Joke' just didn't work for me.

I picked up this book quite randomly about 25 years ago, and ended up reading it a half-dozen times (now I'm reading it yet again). It's a mean little book - Evelyn Waugh would have been proud - and almost every line in it makes me laugh out loud. Yet I always find it oddly moving by the end. It has the quality of a nasty little fairy tale - Weldon's writing has this hilariously Dr. Seuss-like declarativeness - but everything in it is recognizably human -- shockingly so, since Weldon's characters admit to the horrible motives that most of us successfully hide from our loved ones and ourselves. I don't feel like I'm getting across how enjoyable this book really is, but it's the one that got me hooked on her writing, and the one I always come back to. An incredible mix of human pain and comedy, I recommend reading it slowly to really savour the writing - each time I read it again, I find new comedy just in the way she puts things.