Big Brother
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3.9 • 45 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, this is the compelling and confronting story of a sister who risks her marriage to save her morbidly obese brother .
When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn't recognize him. In the four years since the grown siblings last saw one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? Worse, Edison's slovenly habits, appalling diet, and know-it-all monologues drive her health-and-fitness freak husband Fletcher insane. After the big blowhard of a brother-in-law has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: it's him or me. Putting her marriage and two adoptive children on the line, Pandora chooses her brother - who, without her support in losing weight, will surely eat himself into an early grave. BIG BROtHER tackles a constellation of issues surrounding obesity: why we overeat, whether extreme diets ever work in the long run, and how we treat overweight people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) returns to the family in this intelligent meditation on food, guilt, and the real (and imagined) debts we owe the ones we love. Ex-caterer Pandora has made it big with a custom doll company that creates personal likenesses with pull-string, sometimes crude, catch phrases. The dolls speak to the condition of these characters all trapped in destructive relationships with food (and each other): Pandora cooks to show love, to the delight of her compulsively fit husband Fletcher, whose refusal to eat dairy or vary from his biking routine are the outward manifestation of his remove. Pandora's brother Edison eats to ease the pain of a stalled music career and broken marriage. And both live somewhat uncomfortably in the shadow of their father's TV fame. In Big Brother, nothing reveals character more scathingly than food. Early in the book, the nearly 400-pound Edison arrives waddling through an Iowa airport with a "ground eating galumph" a man transformed in the four years since his sister last saw him. He brings the novel energy as well as an occasionally unpalatable maudlin drama. But Pandora will risk everything, including her own health, to save him. If this devotion and Pandora's increasing success with Edison's diet plan sometimes seem chirpily false, a late reveal provides devastating justification.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing ending
We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of my all time favorite books, but none of Lionel Shriver's other books have even come close to that one for me. I did enjoy Big Brother as I was reading it but was so disappointed with the ending. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone who may read it, but to be honest I wouldn't even bother. I think that was my last Lionel Shriver read....