Big Brother

An agile book, pure Shriver, that without dwelling on melodrama manages to create that very drama through a tragicomedy with such a level of sarcasm that you'll feel like washing your fingers as you turn the pages, from the delicious malice it exudes.

And I'm sure you'll end up asking yourself as many questions as you'll need answers she will never give you. She'll just look at you with her arms crossed over her chest, a half-smile on her face like a cut, and tell you very softly, almost in your ear, “think.”

I could spend hours and hours talking about Lionel Shriver. I discovered her when I summoned the courage to read “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which struck me as a masterpiece. And when I like something, I like it too much. And I'm such a fanboy that if I like an author I set out to read everything they've written, and I had already read “Property” and “The Post-Birthday World,” both of which I had loved. “Big Brother” did not, as I expected, leave me indifferent at all.

“Big Brother,” this time, reflects, above all else, on fatphobia. On how our society seems to decide a person's worth by how their trousers fit, and how prejudice leaves by the roadside anyone who doesn't strictly meet the standards of physical beauty imposed by television, magazines or fashion shows. But it dares to go further.

It explores with rare lucidity the ties that bind us, what our family reference points are based on, all the need to save and the residual guilt that springs from those who have grown up with us, who sit year after year at the table beside us at Christmas. It analyses the bond itself surgically. The bond as salvation and as condemnation.

The premise is simple: a woman, the living embodiment of the upper-middle class of deep America, married to a man obsessed with fitness and healthy food whose stepchildren follow much the same line of snobbery as the American dream, welcomes her older brother into her home. A brother she remembers as her teenage hero, a jazz musician, with whom, through sheer inertia, time and space have made the bond resemble a romantic form of nostalgia more than a real connection. What a surprise, then, when she meets him at the airport and finds he weighs almost two hundred kilos and has nothing to do with the athletic university student she left behind. This forces her to confront her prejudices, defend him from others in order to save him, and ultimately face the mistaken place she has reserved for him not only in her life, but in her memory.