Gluttony (The Seven Deadly Sins) [Hardcover]

Francine Prose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0195156994 | ISBN-13: 978-0195156997

In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony.
In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size.
"The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally a lecture in the New York Public Library's Seven Deadly Sins series, this erudite little meditation on appetite and religion matches ancient and medieval texts (Petronius, St. John Chrysostom) with up-to-date references to stomach stapling and Saveur. A confident satirist and stylist, Prose (Blue Angel, etc.) avows her bafflement at the idea of sinful eating and glosses the intervening early modern and postindustrial periods as too contentedly gluttonous-what else is capitalism but the desire for more?-to bother about. Instead she focuses on the morality of the Church, which condemned gluttony in its various forms as an offense against, or at least an obstacle to, godliness. This approach she contrasts with the current ambivalence about food consumption, which extols gastronomic luxury while condemning fat and self-indulgence. Desire for food (rather than the mere need of it) forges a link between body and spirit that seems both inevitable and dangerous: "the wages of sin have changed, and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt and distaste of one's fellow mortals." Sauntering through various texts, Prose offers up a wonderful smorgasbord of factoids and apertus, whose chief ingredient is irony. Thus, the religious culture that regards gluttony as a willful sin but must allow even sinners to eat; the medical culture that calls overeating a blameless compulsion, even as it exhorts us to eat sensible diets. She ends in the modern sphere, commenting astutely on the newest (and most ironic) equation of fat with money, whereby profit is derived from the accumulation and loss of other people's weight. A chapter on celebrations of gluttony, from Fielding to M.F.K. Fisher, closes this stimulating, pointedly dispassionate investigation of a decidedly emotional subject.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Seven writers have been invited to consider the seven deadly sins, and the results are being published in a promising series of small, cleverly illustrated, and, so far, scintillating volumes.

Epstein's recent book on snobbery has met with great acclaim, making him uniquely suited to the task of analyzing envy, since snobbery is based on its cultivation, and, indeed, Epstein is a witty and thoughtful elucidator of this covert and poisonous state of mind. Of the seven sins, Epstein observes, envy is the most common and insidious and the least enjoyable. He discusses various types of envy, the differences between women's and men's envy, Freud's preoccupation with it, and worlds in which envy rages (the arts and academia may be the worst). Epstein confesses to his own struggles with envy over the course of his musings, which grow in gravitas as he moves beyond individuals to consider how envy between nations leads to war and how anti-Semitism can be interpreted as a particularly malignant manifestation of this deadly sin.

Novelist and critic Prose brings her keen interest in our conflicted relationship with our bodies to her creatively, even voraciously researched and elegantly argued inquiry into the paradoxes of gluttony, a sin writ large on the body and, therefore, impossible to conceal. Prose notes that the term is rarely used now that overeating is viewed as a psychological and health problem rather than a "crime against God." Equally conversant in religious and secular perspectives, Prose turns to theology and art to illuminate the curious history of a sin rooted in a behavior essential to survival. She traces the line between gourmandism and binging and ponders the increase in obesity in our consumer culture and the stigma of being overweight in a society that loves excess in everything but body size. Gluttons now sin against "prevailing standards of beauty and health," and the punishment is living hell. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195156994
• ISBN-13: 978-0195156997
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen books of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Francine Prose lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The most deadly sin!? Really?! Prove it!, February 22, 2004

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ewomack "ewomack" (MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gluttony (The Seven Deadly Sins) (Hardcover)

Today the idea of gluttony seems almost like a strange anachronism. People in the United States eat a lot, and restaurants continually meet the demand for larger and larger portions, and shamelessly wave their "NOW BIGGER THAN BEFORE!" banners to all who enter the doors of fast food-hood or of international restaurant chains. Gluttony almost seems accepted, if not a social norm. Eat more! Live! Unfortunately, fat is the outcome of following the rules, and our society also chastises the fat for giving into the social conditioning of "MORE IS BETTER, ESPECIALLY WITH SPECIAL SAUCE!" As a result, obesity and guilt are currently rampant. People with weight problems are pulled in many directions with no seeming resolution to the tension.

"Gluttony" touches on this theme and these tensions. Consumers of food are in a strange position these days. Eat to fit in, but don't eat so much that the cellulite shows, otherwise you won't fit in. One of the most interesting themes that the book does a touch and go on is the notion that those that can get away with gluttony (i.e., those with mega-metabolisms) are not looked down on but envied, but those who gain with every masticulation are shunned. The book could have developed this very fascinating idea more, but as it is, it is mentioned only briefly.

Most of the book is contained in the first chapter. Here, an interesting history of gluttony is demarcated. Just why is gluttony a sin, and why is it often placed at the top of the sin ladder? These questions are answered, along with some very interesting tidbits such as how Saint Francis of Assisi used to put ashes on his food to ward off the pleasure of taste, and Thomas Aquinas' "weight problem". This makes up the bulk of the book. The second chapter describes some of the consequences of gluttony as seen by the Middle Ages and our own age. The weaving of the medieval idea of gluttony and the modern idea of gluttony is not an easy thing to do. There are too many differences between these ideas to really make a solid and incorrigible connection between them. The idea of gluttony today is just incredibly different from the medieval/classical view of it. This tension rides through the entire book, and sometimes the two notions just seem pasted side by side and result in a "yes, okay... that was then, this is now..." type of response that begs to know what the two ideas put side by side are supposed to teach us. Both are interesting in their own right, no doubt, but the book fails in connecting the two in an interesting way. Also, the final two chapters have the feeling of filler. They don't really advance the argument or the theme of gluttony very much. The last chapter, entitled, "Great Moments in Gluttony" is simply a collection from various works of extravagant scenes of gluttony (these scenes are memorable and fun in their own right, such as passages from Rabelais and Petronius). Lastly, there is a great collection of artworks included, some in color. Many of these works are not mentioned in the book itself, and some of the artworks mentioned in the text are not represented in the pictures. They are strangely disconnected from the text (there are no direct references in the text to the artwork, such as "see folio 10").

Nonetheless, this is an entertaining and fun little book to read. There is much to learn about gluttony here, and much to learn about the seven deadly sins in general (since Gluttony was seen as the worst of them and thus able to lead the innocent into violation of the other deadly sins, particularly lust). It may leave one with more questions than answers, but that's to be expected from a topic as enormous as this one. It may be best to think of it as a starting point for further reading on the subject. What it will do, which is why it's worthwhile in the end, is make you think about what you eat and why you eat it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Too soon, too expensively, too greedily, too delicately, and too much, March 10, 2006

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P.B. (Valrico, Florida United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gluttony (The Seven Deadly Sins) (Hardcover)

Gluttony is perhaps the most misunderstood of the seven sins, but in this book we discover that there is much more to it than eating a lot. For one thing most people tend to associate it with overeating, but in reality it also encompasses any harmful kind of indulgence, including alcohol and drugs. Also in the first chapter, the other aspects of gluttony are revealed: too expensively and too delicately, things nowadays most people would be unaware to be related to the sin of gluttony. Once all of this is taken into consideration, one realizes that gluttony may be one of the most common and prevalent of the seven sins today.

The author examines heavily on the medieval views of gluttony; Back in the day, the monks and priests of early churches viewed it as a treacherous, very-easy-to-commit sin, one with a twist: A person must eat to survive, but to enjoy or take pleasure in eating was outright sinful. As well as this, the author also explores the medieval obsession for the consequences of such sin, such as the artistic works of Pieter Brueghel and the sin-obsessed Hieronymus Bosch. In the next chapter, the author brings us to modern times and our paradoxical infatuation with the sin: Our culture that stresses so much on being thin and fit, and yet everywhere we look we see fast food joints and obesity on the rise. The author examines the infamy of gluttony as a killer and humiliating to its indulgers, pointing out the scorn and prejudice that many obese people face from the public and their peers as well as the rising toll of obesity-related deaths. One particularly memorable passage is the story of former singer Carnie Wilson, who underwent laparoscopic bypass surgery after coming close to 300 pounds and near fatal cholesterol and blood pressure levels (perhaps you've seen that commercial).

Overall, one of the most informal of all the books I've read in the seven sins series and one that can be read and understood by casual readers and intellectuals alike; it is a marvelous read! (Though there is some unpleasant imagery in this book, I refuse to let it hurt my rating of this great book)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Fat Police Will Protect Us from the Sin of Gluttony, March 19, 2009

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M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (Paperback)

Francine Prose argues in her acute and trenchant book (really a long essay) Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins, that the Fat Police and their calorie-counting acolytes look upon fat people as a breed of bloated sinners. In doing so, the Fat Police have co-opted religious language and metaphor to divide society into two sides: The reedy svelte souls bound for heaven and the scandalously obese souls bound for hell. To reinforce this polarization, the Fat Police, and even self-loathing fat people themselves, assert big government micromanagement of "fat behavior," so that there are fat taxes imposed on lovers of movie popcorn, colossal burritos, super-sized buckets of ice cream and soda, and other foods that pose a threat to one's salvation.

The Fat Police and their disciples have also proselytized the gospel that moral depravity, "immoral self-indulgence," is at the root of obesity, so that it is clear that fat people are not helpless victims of the environment or genetic hard-wiring but the result of their own damnable sloth, gluttony, and avarice.

Another category that insures fat people suffer the stamp of stigmatization is society's collective resentment that corpulent fleshy souls are guilty of hogging or usurping other people's personal space. What kind of wickedness allows the fat person to assert his gargantuan belly into our area when he squeezes next to us on a train, a bus, or an airplane? His rude and selfish sin is so malignant that he and his obese brothers and sisters should pay for not one but two airline or bus tickets to accommodate their elephantine rumps.

Finally, if fat people can be saved at all, they must resort to a Higher Power: Their countless tons of unwanted flab can only be shed if they throw themselves upon the Alter of God's Mercy and embrace a variety of spiritual rehabilitations--Twelve Step Programs, revivalist gospel tracts, and other motivational tools rooted in the language of God, the devil, sin, and divine providence.