What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges
(rereading this after... 'many' years, and it's surprisingly neither scifi, fantasy, nor supernatural in any possible way)Looooong before John Green was accused of over-using the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope (which he did in Paper Towns but entirely unmade by the end of the book) there was Becky in Peter Hedges' What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
Gilbert Grape lives in Endora, Iowa, with what remains of his family.
'Endora is where we are, and you need to know that describing this place is like dancing to no music. It's a town. Farmers. Town square. Old movie theater closed down so we have to drive sixteen miles to Motley to see movies. Probably half the town is over sixty-five, so you can imagine the raring place Endora is on the weekend.'There isn't much that Gilbert doesn't hate and even less that he enjoys. He's twenty-four and just about everything in his life is gnawing at his dead insides - his lack of experience, his fat and ever-growing mother, his servile big sister, his desperate little sister, and his mentally disabled baby brother are only what he has to deal with on a daily basis.
'She turns off the light and says, "You must have been having a bad dream."In the middle of all of this there's suddenly Becky on her bike, riding in circles around Gilbert and speaking words of such hope about life Gilbert hasn't been able to feel in years.
"Huh?"
"A bad dream. You were having a bad dream."
"Oh," I say, "Is that what I'm having."'
This is a soul crushingly painful story.
It's sexist, fatphobic, ableist, sexualises a 15-year-old, but it's also all of these things because Gilbert doesn't know where to direct all of the hate he harbours for himself. He watches idly while his family and life slowly shatters all around him. He does not stop this. Just as he can see his fat mother slowly wear down the floor underneath her own feet toward a literal crash he can sense his own life metaphorically crash in on him in slow motion. There are so many things in his life that he hates that he's completely lost his ability for love, whichever way it would be directed. Waking up and seeing the same unchanging surrounding is killing him. Yet he doesn't change. Listening to people telling him how much he looks like his father, the same father who committed suicide in the house he built for his family, brings Gilbert further into darkness. Is that to be the family future?
Well written. Dark. Disturbing.
I still like it as much as when I read it the first time.
