Have you ever met a close relative at the airport after an absence of several years, and wondered if you would be able to recognise them? Thankfully, through the auspices of Facebook, this didn't happen to us when we met our niece recently, who had flown over from New Zealand to travel round Europe. Recognition was instant. Sadly for Pandora Halfdanarson, this wasn't her experience when she went to collect her big brother Edison from the airport at Cedar Rapids, who hasn't changed his Facebook profile picture in four years. He's the older brother she had always looked up to: a minor celeb on the New York jazz scene, slim, good-looking, talented, and oozing confidence. When all the passengers have passed through the baggage claim, she doesn't recognise the grossly overweight man being pushed towards her in a wheelchair by two flight attendants. Whilst Edison's girth has changed considerably in the intervening years, underneath the folds of blubber, he appears to be the same person. So what can possibly have gone wrong in Edison's life to bring about such momentous physical change?
Down on his luck, and having slept on too many of his friends' couches, (and possibly broken them), Pandora is persuaded to invite him to Iowa for an extended visit before he takes off on a scheduled jazz tour of Europe. She is so shocked by this man-mountain, who had "never sounded fat over the phone!" that she is almost lost for words, and as Edison settles into life in the home she shares with her husband Fletcher, and two step-children Tanner and Cody, this strained silence is prolonged. Nobody is prepared to ask him how or why he got so big, or why a talented jazz pianist has no inclination to play the piano. He literally becomes the elephant in the room, who leaves a trail of havoc wherever he goes: kitchen stove and work tops covered in mess from his food prep binges, and coffee cup rings on Fletcher's hand-made tables. Something's gotta give, and that something turns out to be the Boomerang, one of Fletcher's earliest pieces of furniture, much beloved by the family, which cracks under Edison's immense bulk.
By this stage, cracks also begin to appear in the strained relationships between spouses, and between brothers-in-law, and the veneer of patient endurance and restraint as the interloper's visit drags on, lifts completely, until Fletcher lets rip at his unwelcome house guest with a diatribe that could strip the French polish off a coffee table at twenty paces. This kind of exchange, where characters externalise exactly what they think of each other is where Shriver excels. She nails the internal monologue of her narrator Pandora, and every other voice of every other character in the book. She is pitch perfect. It is, at one and the same time, horrifically real and excoriating, yet deeply, darkly funny.
Obviously, if no-one intervenes and tries to prevent Edison from gorging himself to death, he will probably explode like Mr. Creosote! Fletcher doesn't think his brother-in-law has the self-discipline to get his weight down. "Put you alone in a room with a plate of French fries, and the spuds win every time. The will is a muscle. Yours is flabby as the rest of you, bro."
As Pandora takes up the gauntlet of fighting for her brother's life, we wonder just how much she is prepared to sacrifice to save him from himself, whether she can help him find a reason for living, other than his own deluded ego, and just how much the ties of blood can bind.
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