The book jumps out at you from the bookstore shelves - as it's meant to do. Bright yellow cover. Big black letters with the monosyllabic title encircled. As a title, Eat Fat is written both as explanation and challenge. This, the dust cover proclaims, is a book that's meant to be provocative.

Now, I tend to Eat Fat regularly, so perhaps this appellation doesn't have the same impact for me as your average Barnes & Noble customer. Klein is an academic who appears to enjoy the role of dilettante contrarian. His first book, Cigarettes Are Sublime, had a title Jesse Helms would love.This roleplaying makes him a less-than-ideal spokesperson for size acceptance, but to be fair, Klein himself states that his goals in writing the book revolve less around acceptance than size celebration. I can appreciate the distinction, even as I continue to find his motives suspect.

As a cultural critic, however, Klein is aces on examining the assumptions surrounding size - even when he himself occasionally gives into them. Though he realizes our fanatic quest for fat-free food and dieting has given us a nation of Americans fatter than it was before we started, he also describes his own desire to lose twenty to thirty pounds. The extra weight may not be the unhealthy burden that diet-mongers have tried to convince us it is, he states, but it clashes with his sense of who he really is. Heaven forbid that he actually have to accept himself as a "fat man."

This land is full of people postponing their lives until that unattainable day when they no longer have to deal with the specter of fat. It's not surprising to read that, on some levels at least, Klein is one of them. It does, however, undermine the message of his own book.

But Klein, I suspect, is comfortable with that contradiction, so let's not beat it into the ground. Let's focus on some of Eat Fat's strengths instead: as a deconstructionist, Klein is superb. His look at images of fat throughout history may have been done elsewhere but seldom so succinctly. And each consideration serves to remind us that the demonization of "obesity" hasn't always held sway. He's equally strong documenting the unethical way that the medical profession has systematically treated fat patients.

Klein is less successful looking at fatness and sex, in part because he chooses to focus on one subculture (the audience for Fat Girl, a magazine "for and about Fat Dykes"), which itself runs the risk of reinforcing one stereotype about fat women. (He also criminally shortchanges Dimensions in the process.) But he is completely entertaining discussing fatness as it is manifested in the political world. You can also see him having a good time in a textural consideration of the play "Hamlet," which proposes the central idea that Shakespeare's hero was fat. (Take that, Kenneth Branagh!)

Eat Fat is a quick read, deliberately repetitive at times, and skippable in places. While nowhere near the work of Hillel Schwartz's landmark look at the history of dieting, Never Satisfied - a book Klein himself quotes on several occasions - it still makes a good addition to the size acceptance library, where all the books remain flawed by their authors' very human relationship to the subject of fat.

Copyright 1997 - Oakhaus Designs

---Wilson Barbers