Jarrell, D. and Sukrungruang, I. (2003). What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology. Orlando and New York: Harvest, Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-602907-3. $14.00.

Reviewed by Jana Evans Braziel, University of Cincinnati

Defiantly hailing readers as voyeurs in a world where–as Laura Kipnis reminds us–fat is (in and of itself) pornographic, editors Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang have collected a veritable smorgasbord of literary texts addressing fatness in their literary anthology. As with all buffets, some samples are delectable, utterly irresistible, and others? Well, they may leave you hungry, or even feeling ill. While the collection is subtitled The First Fat Fiction Anthology, it also includes poetry as well as short stories.

The problem is this: the defiant question asked in the volume's title becomes mired, perhaps at times lost, in other emotions, awash in other predilections and dispositions. Here we have stories and poems of fat sex, fat murder, fat eugenics, fat divorce, fat midlife crises, fat and food–lots of food, fat and dieting–lots of dieting, fat self-loathing, fatness and deep-seated feelings of inferiority, fat complexes, fat girl's dreams (which I love, by the way), and fat-fests that celebrate avoirdupois.

In essence, we have the entire array of cultural hang-ups and loaded baggage that too frequently accompany fat and the portrayal–literary or otherwise–of fat folks. We have pathologies, and we have textual-corporeal parties: but the anthology's tone is not finally one of untainted celebration or even of total defiance. The underlying organizational principle for the anthology is simply "fat"; unfortunately, too many of the authors reproduce and recycle uninterrogated notions of what that means and may mean in narrowly or restrictive (or even slim) terms. In other words, it often reads as (and sometimes reeks of) all the mixed-and-contradictory cultural impulses always already directed toward fatness and fat bodies.

To be sure, there are some literary gems here–perhaps especially, in my literary critical mind, Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; Andre Dubus' "The Fat Girl"; Rhoda B. Stammel's "Love for a Fat Man"; Dorothy Allison's "Dumpling Child" (although one laments that "A Lesbian Appetite" was not included); and J.L. Haddaway's "When Fat Girls Dream"–and then there are some bizarre stories exacting sadistic surgical maneuvers (and one speculates: thin slicing-and-dicing) on corpulence (such as Peter Carey's "The Fat Man in History" and George Saunder's "The 400-Pound CEO"), though even these stories are not without literary merit. But the pathos and ethos of fat in those stories may leave one with a very bad aftertaste in one's mouth.

Perhaps if Jarrell and Sukrungruang had guided their readers, not just defiantly hailed them into subjective readership (à la Althusser) through the title, this element could have found explanation, say, in an editors' introduction. Alas, the editors' introductory words are too thin, and while they claim to have included "works that illustrate the range of 'fat' experience," one wonders about issues of literary representation: whose experiences are being illustrated? And by whom? (Yes, I can almost hear the exhausted groan of aesthetes lamenting one more political claim for literature, much less a fat activist political claim.) Yet, in the explosive cultural politics of fatness and representations of fat bodies, one can hardly argue that it does not matter.

Enjoy the read–or at least most of it.

And by the way: what are you looking at?