Dietland by Sarai Walker

Dietland

by Sarai Walker

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

ISBN: 978-0544373433

320 p.p.

The cover art of Dietland sums up, in many ways, the book: the cover shows a cupcake, made to look like a hand grenade. When reading this book, we wander into a story that at first looks like many “chick-lit” books, and it quickly explodes all that we might expect in a chick-lit story. We begin in a coffee shop where Plum is tapping away at her laptop, working as a ghostwriter for a fashion magazine. She answers the queries of teen girls, trying to convince them that their teenage angst about body, bodies, and everything else, is something that will change. Plum is fat—and her weight seems to negatively affect everyone around her. She’s the one staff member of the fashion magazine who is told to telecommute from Brooklyn rather than work in the shining, pristine offices of the fashion empire in Manhattan. So she haunts her neighborhood in Brooklyn, shuffling between coffee shop, apartment, and market. And while her present seems boring and dismal, her closet is filled with the vibrant, new clothes she will wear after her gastric bypass.

To explain the plot, structure, or main trajectory of this book is hard, for it revels in a chaotic glory. The structure doesn’t follow traditional fiction patterns; at first, we think this will be another Bridget Jones’ Diary, XXL-sized. But just when we’re settling into a chick lit story, the book erupts in a news-reader voice to tell us about rapists being thrown off a bridge and thrown from airplanes. Soon we learn about “Jennifer,” an unknown person or group exacting justice against rape culture. And Plum herself will be initiated into a shadowy guerilla women’s movement which we will spend the rest of the book trying to figure if, and how, it relates to Jennifer, and who/what Jennifer is.

One of the things that was truly enjoyable about this book was how the main character, Plum, sought not just to change herself or her attitudes (she tries makeovers as well as rethinking how she views herself), but she is also involved in a group that strikes out against dominant female-shaming persons and practices. This becomes much more than a book about the prevalent female preoccupation of how much space women should take up—it becomes a discussion of many different ways that women are told to take up less attention, resources, space, or told to give men what men want. In that way, Plum becomes a lens for a critique not merely of rape culture but of all the ways in which women’s magazines, and even women’s literary enterprises such as “chick lit,” uphold a man’s world.

Pulling off a satire of rape culture is a hard task, and Walker handles this extremely well, finding a variety of tenors to use in her critique to keep it from sounding dogmatic. One of the things that I think helps is having the differing voices in the novel which all work to contour the discussion: we’ll see glimpses of the Nola and Nedra television show, and get their reporting and take on Jennifer’s work. We’ll see Plum react to this with a different level of intensity. We’ll meet other marginal women along the way. We learn that this is a novel about more than weight when we meet the other women of Calliope House (the guerilla group/women’s collective/commune where Plum ends up). This is also where she realizes that just having a female body that doesn’t conform to societal expectations of beauty means that her body is political—it is a body that people seek to control and to take power away from. These different accounts all build up to a chorus, helping perpetuate the idea that Jennifer speaks for a multitude of women and their own experiences.

There’s also the vicarious angle of watching the news of people being punished for being part of the dominant rape culture. It’s interesting to watch how the novel builds to a place where, when we start watching this with Plum, the reader is in agreement that vicariously watching this is satisfying. The world of Dietland is one where it’s ok to say you want to be a part of this. It also directly addresses the idea that culture dictates that women have to be “likeable,” a point which, looking at some of the reviews on public sites, is something that people—even women readers—have trouble feeling comfortable letting their female protagonists be. For that alone, I think Walker’s found a raw nerve that I’m glad she’s poking at.

As a novel, this was an enjoyable, different voice to hear. That Walker was able to develop this in characters, as well as in form, shows off her great skills in finding new ways to express her story. That it’s the author’s first novel bodes well for the future. I cannot wait to read more from her in the years to come.

***

Sarai Walker received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Bennington College. As a magazine writer, her articles appeared in national publications, including Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She subsequently served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves, before moving to London and then Paris to complete a Ph.D. She currently lives in the New York City area. Dietland is her first novel.