Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver – review

‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the big brother of the title, the handsome, free-wheeling, jive-talking Edison, a jazz pianist.

The siblings grew up in LA, their dysfunctional family life paralleled, almost parodied, in Joint Custody, a prime-time television drama scripted by Travis Appaloosa, their smarmy, self-aggrandising father. This prolonged and subtle betrayal drives Pandora to seek anonymity in quiet Iowa, while Edison, in bohemian New York, craves public attention, and trades on his father’s fame to attain it. Edison uses the stagey ‘Appaloosa’ as his surname, while Pandora sticks with the cumbersome but authentic ‘Halfdanarson’.

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But the roles find a way of reversing themselves. Pandora, as an only half-affectionate joke against her control-freak husband Fletcher, invents a ring-pull doll, a mini-me tailored to mimic the verbal tics and catch-phrases of the recipient. She seems unaware that her dolls potentially undermine the morale of the people they satirise, just as her father’s scripts undermined her own sense of self.

But the gimmick catches on, and Pandora finds herself rich and feted, in awkward contrast to Fletcher, who toils in the basement making exquisite pieces of furniture which no one in Iowa wants to buy. As Pandora’s success grows, her husband literally dwindles; he becomes a ‘nutritional Nazi’, inflicting his broccoli-and-brown-rice regime on his resentful teenage children and cycling obsessively to shed every microbe of body fat; ‘simply being in his physical presence made me feel chided’.

Thus the balance of power in the household is already wobbling when Edison, who has run out of luck and into debt, arrives for a long stay.

Pandora hasn’t seen her brother for four years.Collecting