Synopsis
Weighing in at sixty-seven pounds, twenty-five-year-old graduate student and anorexic Josie finds herself recovering from her disorder at a treatment center, where she rages against all forms of treatment
Reviews
With nightmarish accuracy and bleak wit, this first novel chronicles the traumatic hospitalization of 25-year-old Josie, an anorexic graduate student who has starved herself down to 67 pounds. Institutionalized against her will, the first-person narrator is forced to recall her painful adolescence and dissatisfying sexual experiences, while Shute weaves in "excerpts" from glossy fashion magazines and diet books to hint at the sociological underpinnings of this contemporary female madness. But the author is less concerned with etiology than with maintaining a continuous description of the anorexic experience itself. Josie tabulates calories reflexively, sees eating as bestial and shameful, pores over the food sections of the newspaper ("poetry: the only kind I read"). Her lunch trays glimmer with almost psychedelic imagery, and an orange slice is "reptilian rind and colony of pustular sacs." The unwavering bitterness, the lurid preoccupation with food and the remoteness of the narrator may make this book too intense for some but also certify its authenticity. Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
First-novelist Shute creates a harrowing saga of a woman so afflicted with anorexia nervosa that she almost starves to death, her food crawling with filthy associations and the act of eating itself hallucinatory in its obscenity. Josie, a 25-year-old graduate student, weighs 67 pounds when she is taken against her will to a treatment center for eating disorders. Although she is literally starving to death, her lips blue and her skin covered with a strange layer of soft protective hair, she eyes her food tray--chicken and broccoli and milk--with disgust: ``A corpse and a tree; a fluid secreted by bovine mammary glands. Gobs of congealed grease.'' She dreams of existing on air like a plant and cherishes the strength of her will and her pure, clear shape. Just bones. Even though her skeletal shape makes her parents cry and others gasp, she starts each day with the deeply satisfying ritual of fingering the hollows and contours of her bones. Threatened with force-feeding and watched by a nurse, she nibbles at her food. Day by day, in spite of herself, her strength and sanity begin to return. She remembers her adolescence and the genesis of her disease--she was a plump girl in a world that tolerated only slender women. Filled with self-hatred for having a body that didn't conform to the fashion magazines, she began to diet, making a religion of it until only the perfection of pure bone would do. Shute, telling the story in Josie's voice, limits her scope to the narrow, obsessive thoughts of an anorexic, so her portrait, while harrowing and absorbing, is more a fictional journal than a full-fledged novel. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
After lengthy treatment at an eating disorder clinic, Josie, a 25-year-old anorexic victim weighing 67 pounds, confesses that she "never planned to disappear." Escalating self-degradation prompts her to seek perfection by starving her body at the vulnerable age of 16. She adopts fashion magazines and diet books as her mentors and seeks nirvana through their shallow promises. Absorbed in their own marital problems, Josie's parents fail to acknowledge their daughter's plight. Off at college, Josie isolates herself and devotes her life to exercise and starvation to become the quintessential woman who is never thin enough. Having lost all rational sense, Josie becomes dysfunctional. In a visceral, haunting account of the horrors of anorexia, Shute chillingly explores society's manic obsession with being a perfect size. For Shute, Life-Size is a splendid first novel. For readers, it is a compelling account of the psychological and physical torment experienced by anorexic victims who may not survive. Highly recommended. Literary Guild selection.
- Mary Ellen Elsbernd, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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