The fresser’s tale

Jami Attenberg’s novel is about appetites for passion and life

By JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN
A McDonald's Big Mac meal 370 (photo credit: McDonald's Israel)
A McDonald's Big Mac meal 370
(photo credit: McDonald's Israel)
Edie Middlestein weighs 300 pounds and faces surgery on her legs for diabetes-related complications. At the start of Jami Attenberg’s story of a middle-class Jewish family consumed by their various appetites, Edie’s pharmacist husband Richard has left her to try and recoup some happiness and perspective in the face of his wife’s girth. “His happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn’t know that yet.”
That kind of foreshadowing occurs throughout Attenberg’s lurching yet cohesive plot where food looms large. Ultimately, food is the Middlesteins’ undoing. This American and American-Jewish obsession with meals shows up everywhere from a super-sized McDonald’s dinner gobbled in secret to an over-the-top bar mitzva reception.
A brief prologue shows “little Edie” already weighing 62 pounds at the age of five. Her parents, Russian immigrants to Chicago’s South Side, set the table for a lifetime of bad eating habits, and a misguided notion that food is love.
The dining-room table of this fiercely Zionist family was transformed into an altar at which Edie was unknowingly sacrificed. This made food both life affirming and deadly for little Edie who “ate on behalf of Golda [Meir] recovering from cancer. She ate in tribute to Israel. She ate because she loved to eat. She knew she loved to eat, that her heart and soul felt full when she felt full.” But as the years go by, that satisfying feeling of fullness alternates between the simple pleasure of eating and “grinding all the joy out of her memories.”
Richard and Edie have two children who have as ambivalent a relationship with food as they do with their parents. Robin, unmarried, is a history teacher whose difficult personality matches her mother’s. She was a chubby child who grows up to become repulsed at the sight of Edie’s overflowing kitchen cabinets and outsized take-out orders. Having given up on food as a measure of love, Robin encounters her own difficulties in her personal relationships, pushing away people as her mother often did.
Benny is continuing his parents’ middleclass life with mixed results. Unlike his sister, he has a soft spot for his mother – an affection that reaches back to his childhood. The night before his mother’s first surgery, he sits in her kitchen, a sentinel of sorts, making sure his mother doesn’t eat after the prescribed time.
Obligation has forcibly replaced passion for Benny. He lives in a sprawling Chicago suburb with his wife Rachelle and is the father of twins – Josh and Emily – who have spent more time perfecting their hip-hop dance routine for their b’nei mitzva reception than their Torah portion. Attenberg is pointed and spot on about what takes priority in American Jewish rites of passage. Her brilliant social commentary inevitably turns to food where a sundae bar complete with a garish chocolate fountain intrudes on what should have been a more contained and sacred moment.
The plot’s subtle movement towards the twins’ b’nei mitzva takes in flashbacks of Edie’s life. There she is at the kitchen table giving her children McDonald’s. The scene goes from excessive to primal with Edie lunging at the McRib sandwiches dripping with barbecue sauce and desire. She literally steals food out of her children’s mouths to mollify cravings that will never be sated.
One of the more curious plot lines in the novel is Edie’s romance with a Chinese restaurant owner, Kenneth. Rachelle, Edie’s nervous, twitchy, bird-like daughter-in-law, discovers Edie’s new love as she follows her to one of Edie’s eating refuges.
Rachelle spies on Edie, watching her motherin- law drive up to fast-food windows and then consume grease-stained bags of untold amounts of food in her car. Rachelle’s reaction is not just horror; she also imposes rigid and extreme control on herself and her family.
Attenberg describes this Jewish housewife as the kind of woman “who would adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes… so it could be just right.”
Naturally, this attention to detail permeates Rachelle’s life. But Attenberg is too good a writer to typecast Rachelle. She turns the tables, and the reader sees that Rachelle’s tightfisted obsession with food is as dangerous as the temptations steering Edie toward a slow suicide. Both women camouflage their unhappiness with food. Rachelle serves her family flavorless salmon with dull brown rice.
The unhappy meal – perhaps the quintessential opposite of a McDonald’s Happy Meal – is washed down with water. Edie gulps her food, while Rachelle cuts hers into tiny squares.
By the end of the book, though, each of these characters’ lives is profoundly transformed by food and its attendant consequences.
In an interview in The New York Times, Attenberg noted, “I worked very hard not to establish Edie as a grotesque character.” This is no easy feat when writing about a 300-pound woman whose outsized appetites can border on the disgusting. But for all its descriptions of, and yes, even obsession about food, “The Middlesteins” is a restrained book. It is about appetites for passion and life. It is about a profound death wish that mingles with love. It is about the complicated dance between parents and children at all stages of life. But it is also a wise book. “I wanted to write about someone who refused to take care of herself, and how family members were contending with it. Food obsession came along after that.”
Given that mandate, Jami Attenberg has, with her fourth novel, made a substantial contribution to the American-Jewish literary canon. 