• Big Brother by Lionel Shriver was published in June 2013
• Publisher: Harper
• 373 pages

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver is, on one level, a book about family obligations. Shriver uses the story of an Iowan named Pandora whose morbidly obese brother comes to visit for two months to examine the dynamics between siblings and spouses. The book is also, however, about another character in every family (nay, in every life) -- food.

From the beginning of the novel, the characters' relationships with food and Pandora's thoughts on food are just as big as the relationships between people. On the first page, Shriver write, "were I honestly to total the time I have lavished on menu planning, grocery shopping, prep and cooking, table setting, and kitchen cleanup for meal upon meal, food, one way or another, has dwarfed my fondness for Places in the Heart to an incidental footnote; ditto my fondness for any human being, even those whom I profess to love. I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch" (3).

In fact, Pandora has a lot to say about food throughout the novel. For a character who says of herself, "I considered most convictions entertainment, their cultivation a vanity, which is why I rarely read the newspaper. My knowing about an assassination in Lebanon wouldn't bring the victim to life, and given that news primarily aggravated one's sense of helplessness I was surprised it was so widely heeded" (16), Pandora's diatribes on food are quite extensive.

Sometimes I thought her tangents about food were what made the novel great -- giving readers something to chew on. Other times, I found her diatribes a distraction and was eager to get back to the main story. I will say this, though: the food analysis made me appreciate Shriver's mind and also changed my relationship with food in the weeks I was reading this novel.

Food aside, the relational dynamics in the novel center on Pandora and her husband and Pandora and her brother. The husband and brother despise each other, hence the conflict. Pandora, who is a first person narrator, is not entirely likeable, and the tension with her husband is evident from the start. When she describes their financial situation, she says, "Technically, we pooled our resources. But when one party contributes the contents of an eyedropper and the other Lake Michigan, 'pooling' doesn't seem the right word, quite" (11). Besides feeling entitled because she is more financially successful, Pandora also assumes her only-child husband cannot possibly understand sibling relationships and therefore is wrong to criticize how she interacts with her brother. During the novel, then, readers watch a shift in loyalty from chosen family back to primary family, which Shriver portrays through scenes such as when the husband comes down in the middle of the night to ask Pandora and Edison to be quieter: "When Fletcher loomed in the doorway in his robe, I was inevitably reminded of the way [our father's] entrance into our Tujunga Hills kitchen had pooped the party when we were kids, and we'd fiddle with homework or mutely load the dishwasher, waiting for our father to go away. So my real treachery was replicating that old social geometry. Fletcher and I were the ones who were supposed to hang. My husband and I should have stopped talking when my brother walked in" (103).

This is not, however, a novel about a wife choosing intimacy with brother over intimacy with husband. In fact, Pandora and Edison mostly maintain a superficial relationship. She muses, "I myself had not once alluded to Edison's weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so -- he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don't recognize my own brother, and now we're all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit" (65). As the planned date of Edison's departure approaches, Pandora is "crestfallen that I'd had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to truly get to know my only brother as an adult, and I'd squandered most of his visit waiting for him to leave" (145).

With the tension of all these different dynamics in place and nothing seeming especially good or close to being resolved, Shriver moves readers into parts II and III of the novel. These parts are where bigger choices are made and relationships shift. Shriver keeps the plot spicy even as she continues to have Pandora wax heavy on food and family.

Overall, I enjoyed Big Brother and recommend it to book clubs and individuals. It certainly provides food for thought, but also contains a good story (with a last chapter left me even more satisfied than I expected). I thought the story was especially poignant because I had read Shriver's bio before the book, which made me aware that she has a brother who died of morbid obesity in real life and that she also has a unique relationship with food -- eating only one meal a day and running 10 miles every other day. I had not read Shriver's previous novels, but Big Brother made it clear why she is one to watch.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.