Big Brother: Brilliant family fiction from the award-winning author of We Need To Talk About Kevin

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In the end the author abandons any sense of compassion for the man who has successfully completed his diet, just as his sister abandons him, by setting the scene of him gorging on chocolate cake. But yeah, supposedly, this guy will eat powdered sugar straight from the bag, but in the process just gets powdered sugar everywhere because of course he's a slob; takes a first serving at a first meal that is more than half of a casserole so that others are left hungry because of course he's hungry, stupid, and selfish; insists on making the rest of the skinny family inordinate amounts of terribly unhealthy food because he's inconsiderate, pushy, and stupid; etc.

There is no precise wrong/right answer in my opinion, per se, only vaguely times where it seems blatantly obvious that one should do something. Dropping the subjects of sentences does not make your characters seem more laid-back and casual; it just chops up the prose and ruins its rhythm.But there's poetry too: she relishes the precise flavour and power of one word next to another, and the result is writing of a beauty and character that is lamentably missing from so much of the fuzzy-lazy meandering that these days passes for literary fiction.

She comes at this huge subject through a sister torn between saving her morbidly obese older brother, who has "buried himself in himself," and an unsympathetic, belligerently fit husband — a situation that raises questions about divided loyalties and whether blood is thicker than water. Pandora is the middle child of a man who has a TV series in the 70's, somewhat like the Brady Bunch, only it's about a family of divorce. Oh and of course he doesn't just sh**, he poops so much that there's literally poop chunks floating down the hall. I have sung the praises of the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and even recommended it multiple times to my most literary friend, Haley (even though she still hasn't read it. Then and only then could Edison be granted full character status, including a sense of humor (paraphrasing: "Boy sis, at my highest weight I could have been a sandbag!When you give any thought to any element of it – from the physical properties of faeces, to the range of human bowel capacity, to Edison's character as it had been drawn up to that point – none of it is convincing. Her controversial breakthrough novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003), considered the possible connection between maternal ambivalence and a Columbine-like high school murder. And this was all in addition to our confectioner's sugar, which Edison was spooning straight from the box.

Then 'What's for dinner' MUST become, "Yo, what's a hungry cat gotta do around here to score some eats, ya dig, man? The couple exist in a hamster wheel of self-righteous competitiveness (who got up earliest, who ate the least, who cycles the fastest) that abates only once in the novel, as they commiserate with one another over the sudden, undesired proximity of Edison, Pandora's brother, whose obesity disgusts them more profoundly than I could comprehend. She is anticipating his never ending stories about life as a jazz pianist - name dropping and exaggerating.Soon Edison’s slovenly habits, appalling diet, and know-it-all monologues are driving Pandora and her fitness-freak husband Fletcher insane. And I know that Shriver (who wrote one of my all-time favorites, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) won’t skirt around any controversial or uncomfortable issue--so in fact I was actually scared to read this book. It might have been much more powerful if she had written her brother's story in a straightforward way.