Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang are two self-confessed "fat Americans" who learned to embrace the size of their stomachs after looking up the word "fat" in a dictionary. They discovered that, far from having cause to feel ashamed, they were "abounding in desirable elements". Their response was to put together What Are You Looking At?, an anthology of 30 poems and short stories exploring what it means to be fat.
Unfortunately, the upbeat tone adopted by Jarrell and Sukrungruang soon feels misplaced. To be fat, most of the pieces suggest, is to be very, very miserable. You will be laughed at, shunned and bullied. Self-acceptance only engenders loneliness. In short, this collection is a lot sadder and darker than the editors' language suggests - but no less fascinating (or true) for that.
Particularly moving is George Saunders's "The 400-Pound CEO", the tragic story of Jeffrey, an overweight racoon exterminator whose life is "one long bad dream". Another intriguing short story is "Waltzing the Cat", by Pam Houston, an affecting portrait of an emotionally hamstrung family that wears clothes a size too small, to "remind us to eat less". Tobias Wolff's contribution, "Hunters in the Snow", is a frightening study in self-absorption, in which one man's fatness is seen as the outward manifestation of a universal secret shame.
The poetry selection includes verse by Dorothy Allison, Patricia Goedicke and Conrad Hilberry. Allison sensually invokes a lover's image through the food of the American South. In Hilberry's "Fat", a young girl sinisterly describes her body as a rubber costume forced on her one evening "in a strange/car". With her new fingers "tight/like a doctor's glove stuffed with Vaseline", she pleads with the reader to undo her, to lend her a knife.
There are some disappointments - for example, Andre Dubus's "The Fat Girl", about Louise, who slims her way into "the pleasures of the nation", only to realise that she was more comfortable in her previous corpulent form. Although well executed, Dubus's story, originally published in 1977, has not aged well and now seems rather trite, the denouement too familiar. A more recent piece, S L Wisenberg's "Big Ruthie Imagines Sex Without Pain" (2000), is a strangely coy - and dull - exploration of the dreams of an oversized woman with an undersized vagina. Wisenberg has a habit of writing in lists - "cavorting on the bed/fur rug/kitchen table" - that makes it hard for Big Ruthie to imagine anything very vividly. Besides, the insistence on equating visions of pain-free sex with fluffy white rugs is unconvincing.
An entire anthology based around the (mainly American) experience of fat is a tricky thing: as much as there is to say about the subject, it is always going to be difficult to find suitably various ways of saying it. While I was relieved to come across only three mentions of the flesh-loving Rubens it was, perhaps, inevitable that there would be a large number of references to glands, rolls, sub-rolls and multiple chins.
Happily, however, several contributions look at the subject in an entirely original way. The editors sensibly close the collection with one such example: "Fat" by Raymond Carver. First published six years before Dubus's story, but still fresh and urgent today, Carver writes with beautiful economy about an unhappy waitress and an immense man with "long, thick, creamy fingers"; a man so large that he becomes a figure not of fun or pity, but of quiet magnificence, his huge body the site of some ineffable mystery.
Across their selections, Jarrell and Sukrungruang might have made more effort to explore wider social issues - for example, the links between obesity and poverty and the increase of obesity among the young. Even if it is not the "large-hearted celebration of the human spirit" the editors suggest it is, this book is, for the most part, a fascinating trawl through the darker recesses of human flesh and hunger.
Helen Gordon works at Granta magazine
