The praiseworthy aspects of this book are many. As in The Girls, the setting of rural Canada is flawlessly constructed, the dialog is realistic and spare, the emotions are so skillfully revealed that they play through you as subtly as your own heartbeat. But the characters are almost too real in this book, without quite enough spice to make them as interesting as they should be. That could be considered praiseworthy, too, that the writer trusts in the heroic possibilities of 'regular folks.' The trouble is, it wasn't that interesting.
So who are these regular folks? Mary and her husband Gooch. She is a drugstore clerk and he is a delivery truck driver. They do each have one outstanding characteristic. He is extraordinarily tall and she is extraordinarily overweight, but aside from that, they have a polite little marriage in a small town with garden variety pastimes and complaints. When Gooch takes off, Mary is forced to leave the home in which she's hidden her gradually increasing bulk for decades. When she begins to change, everything begins to change. The journey is at times compelling, and at times a little stomach-rolling. But for me, it is never epic.
As Mary ponders her transformation, the reader is asked to ponder it with her. The constant descriptions of her sweat, smells, gas, aches, chafings, sunburns, is one part of it. The other is the addict's orientation of this character to food, her description of her "triggers," the chocolate and grease she craves and stuffs herself with. Reading about food being used in its most addictive and unhealthy ways is grotesque. My heart goes out to people who struggle with this particular addiction, but it is like reading books in which people drink themselves to death. For me, it is very, very difficult to read. For other readers, this might be an entirely different experience.
Even with her food addiction, Mary is a fairly ordinary woman who transforms into, well, to be honest, a slightly more normal ordinary woman. The transformation from 'sick and barely functional' into 'getting better and a lot more functional' is carefully presented, but is it really that interesting? Maybe the trouble is that Mary isn't that interesting. She doesn't read much, has no hobbies, her friendships are polite and surface, she doesn't have an interesting history or much of an interesting take on life. The only thing that really interests her is food and how it affects her body. An entire novel about a person's relationship with her body is a little much for me to take. I much preferred The Girls, in which the author went to such pains to remind us that even in their extraordinary bodies, they were young women with dreams and yearnings. Somehow, positioning the ordinary within the extraordinary worked in that book.
The novel is, in final analysis, not about Mary coming to terms with her husband's desertion of their life together. It is about her learning to come to terms with food, to see it as a source of nourishment and pleasure rather than consolation and self-destruction. This might read as an epic journey for other readers, and if so, I respect our difference of opinion. But for me, this is not a compelling journey.
