Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsBiting, stinging satire
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2016
This is a complicated book, not a lighthearted, fluffy romcom romp. That is not to insult the romcom--I am a big fan of fluffy and fun when I'm in the mood for it. Dietland, on the other hand, is a brutal, often hard to take, depiction of life as a woman.
Told mainly through the lens of its 300-pound main character, Plum, this is a book that makes you cringe at the way society tends to treat people who don't fall within an "acceptable"--whatever that means--body type.
However, the book is more than that as the narrative is framed as a deep, deep deconstruction of what drives the kind of discrimination and cruelty Plum faces. It's an exploration of themes of acceptability that encourage women to subvert their feelings and subject themselves to extreme dietary and beauty methods in order to fit into the narrow (quite literally) role society defines for them. The book is a pretty disturbing meditation on the ways women are encouraged to strive for a "best self" that has little to do with a woman's own happiness or interests in life.
This aspect of the book in particular left me unsettled. It's as if Plum isn't a person, but a project. Rather than engaging with and living her life, she's put it on hold until a future version of herself can start living it. After being bombarded with messages both implicit and explicit, it's easy to see why she lives in the kind of stasis she does, and it's a state I think many women can probably relate to. It's sadly common for women to think things like "when I'm ten pounds thinner, I'll...", begging the question of what they'll do in the interim. Why do women often do this? Why not go out and live the life we have while we have it to live?
I thought Plum herself was a good embodiment of the utter frustration, confusion, and outright pain of being a woman. This book tackles a lot--weight, beauty standards, porn, rape--precisely because women are bombarded with all of these things, often on a daily basis. In a startling scene, one character discusses this and then asks whether it could be considered a form of terrorism. I think there's something to that point.
I could not put this book down, but I gave it four stars instead of five because I was uncomfortable with the violence, even though I suspect that's part of the point. After all, we live in a world where violence is disproportionately visited on women, and we're making very slow progress with changing that sad fact.
