MY FATHER’S DIET and the superficiality of extreme body transformation

On the surface, My Father’s Diet, from Adrian Nathan West, is a story about a young man growing up as part of a broken family in middle America. In his twenties, he appears to be slipping through societal cracks – clinging onto menial jobs, wasting his way through community college and struggling to establish an amicable relationship with his mother’s partner.

He never seems to feel at home in the world, and this aimlessness to him re-establishing a relationship with his absent father, a middle-aged man with a growing repertoire of ex-wives and a fixation on self-improvement, a fixation which peaks when he enters and obsessively trains for a body transformation contest.

Not much more than that happens, but the strength of the book lies in its execution. Adrian Nathan West has a sharp pen, capable of saying a lot with small details, and the characters feel like fully realised human beings. They are all driven by a sense of something lacking in their lives, failure seeping through their pores, yet there are societal factors that supersede their flaws.

By humanising them in My Father’s Diet, Nathan West shines a light on problems with the modern perspective of life, problems that cannot be fixed by individual acts of self-improvement.