It's like one of my students writing, thinking that the more SAT words cramped into a sentence the better. As Pandora and Edison embark on their terrifyingly strict liquid diet, and as – touchingly and literally – a long-ago version of Edison starts to reappear, so too the experiment begins to take its toll on the whole family. Consumed with control", he rides his bicycle for hours each day and follows a diet so "stringent" that simply being "in his physical presence" makes Pandora feel "chided".

And then they finally wind down and sit down and you are watching the special again, and just as you start getting into the special, s/he gets back up again and does it all over again. In another instance, Pandora reflects, “I believed – and could not understand why I believed this, since I didn’t believe it – that the number on the dial was a verdict of my very character. The couple exist in a hamster wheel of self-righteous competitiveness (who got up earliest, who ate the least, who cycles the fastest) that abates only once in the novel, as they commiserate with one another over the sudden, undesired proximity of Edison, Pandora's brother, whose obesity disgusts them more profoundly than I could comprehend.This book just used that premise to allow the author to proselytize about the social stigmas of obesity. She had so many killer-awesome sentences - I ‘had’ to open up my ebook and read her words - I almost wished I had the physical book. The novel eventually breaks down into a kind of meta-fiction in which the earnest, well-meaning Pandora confesses that much of her tale has been lies of one sort or another. Yet, during the 353 pages, Shriver makes the reader see all the problems of the obese: how they got to their obese weight; what a devastating life it is; how society treats the obese; how truly difficult it is to lose weight.

The rest of Pandora's family was just as stunned by Edison's weight gain ; but despite everyone's shock, nobody talked about Edison's appearance. If we were driving exactly two blocks away, the journey stirred the same amalgam of optimism and anxiety as starting out on a poorly equipped slog of daunting distance during which conditions were bound to turn nasty, unanticipated obstacles could prove insurmountable, and rations-this much is certain-would grow perilously sparse. As with all Shriver's novels, the best parts were the moral inquiries I will be turning over long after I turn over the last page.

Maybe their names aren't so coincidental either: two famous discoverers whose "inventions" had both good and bad consequences.

Edison has ballooned into the kind of fat person who overspills airline seats, gets shoved into alcoves in restaurants, eats obsessively and has opted (in one of many choice phrases) for "suicide by pie". Next, in a scene that may be one of the most unbearably and unsparingly visceral I've encountered in a work of fiction, he evacuates his bowels for the first time in too long.Shriver decided to go the route of Reconstructing Amelia in imposing highly unlikely attributes on a subject she probably knows little about. A sudden death wish, pursued through the medium of fried foods, could be very distressing to watch in a sibling; but as for Fletcher he is merely the brother-in-law, doesn't even like the guy, and despises Edison for his weakness. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. An explanation offered after a calamity – "you make my wife cry, and I don't like it" – sounds tinny and baseless, since he gives no outward sign of caring whether his wife cries or not.

And I know that Shriver (who wrote one of my all-time favorites, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) won’t skirt around any controversial or uncomfortable issue--so in fact I was actually scared to read this book. But when he invites himself to stay for a couple of months, she fails to recognise him at the airport. I don't know if it was boredom, desperation, or irritation, but I found myself slipping into this awful persona, using every big word I knew, giving intense answers to small talk questions, until he interrupted me mid sentence and said drolly, "So are you, like, really smart?But it's not the only reason why, pages from the end, you catch yourself with a big uneasy lump in your throat, unable to guess where – and how far – she's prepared to go with this.