Size matters

Dietland. By Sarai Walker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 320 pages; $26.

IN A small café, surrounded by the temptations of baked goods, Plum plumps herself and her laptop down each day to answer e-mails from a thousand teenage girls. Girls who cut themselves, girls with broken hearts, girls who make themselves throw up every night. She does so on behalf of a magazine editor who maintains she is too busy to write herself. Plum works in the café because she is too fat for the slender magazine journalists, who feel ill at ease with her in their glamorous office.

Sarai Walker’s first novel, “Dietland”, is a curious concoction—part exploration of the way society treats the female body, part thriller. Using Plum’s desperate efforts to shed her bulk, Ms Walker unpicks the way in which women are encouraged literally to take up less space. Joining a weight-loss programme, Plum longs to erase her own edges, to shrink into acceptability: “I wanted to become smaller so I wouldn’t be seen. If I was smaller they wouldn’t stare. They wouldn’t be mean.”

Alongside Plum’s anguish runs the story of a guerrilla feminist group which takes aim at society’s ingrained patriarchs with brutal effect. A dozen men accused of rape, including footballers and pornographers, are kidnapped and dropped to their deaths from a skydiving plane. In response to...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1FiInxs