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by Adrian Nathan West
Tired of being ashamed of your body? Ask your doctor if this journey to the dark heart of American masculinity is right for you!
In a broken-down Middle American town, the disintegration of a struggling family―its ambitions and emotions worn thin―is laid bare through the cold eyes of its only son. While studying at the local community college to finish his degree, he works what his divorced parents deem to be menial jobs and tries to stay out of their way, keeping his pitiless observations about their lives to himself. He says nothing about his semi-estranged father's doomed attempts to find meaning in the world. He says nothing about his mother's willingness to subjugate herself to men he deems unworthy. He says nothing about the anonymity and emptiness to which their social classes and places of birth seem to have condemned everyone he knows, robbing them of even the vocabulary to express their grievances. He says nothing about his own pity, disgust, compassion, disdain, tenderness, and love for them.
But when another in a long line of his father's boozy relationships falls apart, something changes. He wants to have a chat with his boy. The son fully expects to be talking his dad out of committing suicide, but no: the old man has other plans for his carcass. He has, in fact, entered a bodybuilding competition, and wants his son's help to get fit. If the alternative is despair, how can the son refuse?
Instantly relatable, impeccably realized, and grimly hilarious, My Father's Diet is equal parts Kierkegaard, This Side of Paradise, and Pumping Iron: an autopsy of our antiquated notions of manhood, and the perfect, bite-sized novel for a world always keen to mistake narcissism for introspection.
"West is consistently poised on a very narrow line between blackhearted contempt for these characters and comic mockery of them. But because he never slips off that line, he generates a certain affection for his characters...Everybody here is hard to love, but their good intentions, however misguided, make them easy to engage with. A crisp novel with plenty of momentum despite chronicling lives stuck in neutral." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[An] accomplished debut...Tender, sardonic, and endearingly grotesque, this coming-of-age body horror makes easy work of the heavy lifting." - Publishers Weekly
"Imagine a precise, refined eye looking at all the grotesque realities of mall life in Middle America and you'll have a sense of My Father's Diet. It's as if the Joyce of Dubliners were looking at Akron." - Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and A Saint from Texas
"Adrian Nathan West, one of our best translators, is also one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial―sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion―that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture―of the patrimony―that we, all of us, have ruined." - Joshua Cohen
This information about My Father's Diet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adrian Nathan West has translated more than twenty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German. His first book, The Aesthetics of Degradation, was published in 2016. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other journals in print and online.
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