I first read of The Exerciser (Ballantine Books, 1974) in the letters pages of Dimensions - a passing ref by editor Conrad to this seventies parody that whetted my appetite for the book. Took me more than a decade to find a copy, but thanks to a nifty used book site named www.bibliofind.com , I was recently able to get my hands on one. If I weren't such a fanatical completist, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

A paperback original written in the wake of The Exorcist, the book is one of a slew of dashed-off trifles created by comedy writer Sol Weinstein in the seventies. (Weinstein's most successful books have to be his James Bond parodies featuring a Jewish spy named Israel bond.) Jokey and very much of their moment, Weinstein's paperbacks typically saw one printing and then vanished into the limbo of soft-cover ephemera reserved for quicky unauthorized celebrity bios and flavor-of-the-month jokes books. More than twenty-five years later, it's not an easy book to find.

But, of course, I'd be looking for it. For Weinstein's little (145 pages) paperback - written in collaboration with Sol Albrecht - is more than just an Exorcist spoof. It's also an early weight gain fantasy. Where William Peter Blatty's source novel concerned itself with the demonic possession of an innocent Georgetown moppet named Regan, The Exerciser is about the possession of a slender Levittown wife by a Tibetan gluttony demon named Chow Down. Celia, the possessed victim, is the wife of a successful teevee chef (modeled after The Galloping Gourmet), and through the course of her possession, she balloons from a 105-pound waif into a rapacious 350-pound gourmand.

The process is not as delightful as a lover of w.g. imagery would like. True to the original source, the possessed Celia also becomes foul-mouthed and murderous - not to mention given to the same noxious tendencies as the demonically controlled Regan. (If you're guessing that there'll be a scene involving pea soup, you're right.) Not only does the enraptured Levittown housewife eat everything within reach, she's messy, noisy and obnoxious - given to bad food puns at every turn and repeatedly described by the authors as grotesque. She is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fun date.

Though we don't get much in the way of physical description, the book has some amusing moments: foremost is a scene where the mid-sized Celia is taken to a “diet-cum-confessional” group called Fat Fighters. Juggling an array of tantalizing treats before the other members of the group, she so tempts them that the whole group descends en masse at a nearby Howard Johnson's.

Chow Down is defeated, of course, by an over-the-hill teevee exercise guru named Romaine LeLane. But for a while, it's fun imagining Celia's over-the-top binges, even if the authors are incapable of describing her in a complimentary way. Most fat admirers learn to screen a lot of pejoratives when they're in the midst of fanta-sizing.

So much of the book, unfortunately, is devoted to parodies of other pop culture icons - Jack LaLane, teevee's Columbo, the aforementioned Graham Kerr - that it takes more pages than necessary to get to hungry Celia's plight. Weinstein and Albrecht are more interested in tossing off Borsht Belt one-liners than in writing an involving comic fantasy. As a result, the story's comic potential is largely squandered. Outside of a nice front and back cover photo (featuring a plus-sized beauty who could've stepped out of a period novelty calendar), the book is more enjoyable for all its unexplored moments than the scenes it actually gives us.

If I'd come across Weinstein and Albrecht's book when it was first printed, there's a lot that I probably could've read between the lines. Today, with more explicit and provocative fare regularly being produced by young fat admirers, The Exerciser is little more than an interesting artifact. Still, one occasionally hears the title mentioned whenever FAs gather to discuss early influential fantasies. Which only reinforces this basic truism: one FA's defining dream may be just a chintzy pink paperback to you or me.

Winter 2001

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