Gluttony by Francine Prose
Pritchard, Marietta
A LIFETIME SUPPLY OF SAUSAGE Gluttony Francine Prose Oxford University Press, $17.95, 108pp. Marietta Pritchard How many of us have ever hidden a box of expensive candy from our housemates or...
...Novelist Francine Prose has looked squarely at questions such as these and come up with a fine, witty book that takes into account the history of our beliefs and attitudes toward gluttony...
...Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, and who mind earthly things...
...Does our right hand wielding the creme fraiche in a fancy restaurant know what our left hand is doing living on cold cereal from a food pantry...
...Marietta Pritchard How many of us have ever hidden a box of expensive candy from our housemates or children...
...Do we fear hell and damnation for our overindulgence...
...Glutton," she points out astutely, is a word we don't use anymore, an "unfashionable term," since, as a society, we've moved from a primarily religious worldview to a psychological one...
...They are, in descending order of severity: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth...
...Along with fat jokes, the book features evocative color plates of works from artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Diego Rivera, demonstrating Prose's contention that gluttony is by far the easiest and most satisfying of the major sins to illustrate, and reinforcing the timeless schadenfreude of seeing those particular sinners punished...
...Is it the fear of God or the scornful eyes of the spandexed people at the health club that drives us to moderation or worse...
...It's not the devil that makes me overeat, but my unhappy childhood...
...She explains how our current near worship of fine food has made strange tablemates with our fears-rational and less so-of overeating...
...Prose knows whereof she speaks when it comes to food...
...Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" (where the Pardoner quotes St...
...The so-called glutton is a walking rebuke to our self-control, our self-denial, and to our shaky faith that if we watch ourselves, if we do this and don't do that, then surely death cannot touch us...
...Part of a lecture and book series on the seven deadly sins cosponsored by Oxford University Press and the New York Public Library, Gluttony begins with an extended discussion of the historic and literary origins of the Judeo-Christian understanding that gluttony is indeed a sin, and a major one at that...
...Paradoxically, she notes, the rich among us are thin, the poor fat...
...It was Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope-whose other notable accomplishment was the Christianizing of Britain-who codified the deadly sins...
...Marietta Pritchard is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts...
...Or obesity and bad health...
...Ever eaten a whole carton of ice cream or wolfed down that leftover slab of roast beef at bedtime...
...In our modern, industrialized world, reminders abound about overeating, but the fear of hell has been replaced by the fear of bad health and an early death, or even death itself...
...Doesn't that fat man want to live...
...The first, historical section, feels at times dutiful, a little like a very good term paper...
...I look at a weekly calendar for a college near my home and I find in the same week two events: one a psychologist's lecture titled "Stress, Mood, and Craving: Emotional and Situation-al Influences on Eating...
...A longish essay on the subject of one of the most humanly understandable of the seven deadly sins, Gluttony is compact and nourishing, the literary equivalent of savoring one excellent bittersweet mocha-filled bar of Swiss chocolate...
...Prose quotes Paul's Epistle to the Philippians on "the enemies of the cross of Christ...
...Reading this book helps underline some of the grotesque discontinuities of our culture...
...Put away more wine or liquor than seemed wise...
...John Chrysostom, among others, also put in appearances...
...If so, then surely repentance or at least guilt would seem to be in order...
...the other called "Give Up Your Meals Day," part of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week...
...And the business of dieting is huge-raking in between $33 and $55 billion annually, equal to the gross national product of Ireland...
...And although we claim to pity rather than blame those who can't stop eating, we continue to make jokes about them, such as the ones slyly interspersed throughout the text: Your mama is so fat that when she goes out to eat, she looks at the menu and says "okay...
...Her 1981 novel, Household Saints, is set in and around a family butcher shop: "The sausage, perfectly cooked, put Lino in such an unusually good mood that he gave up struggling against his fate and embraced it as a blessing in disguise: He wasn't losing a daughter, he was gaining a lifetime supply of sausage...
...A series of more and less familiar sources are cited...
...Prose hits her stride in chapters titled "The Wages of Sin," "The Real Wages of Sin," and "Great Moments in Gluttony...
...Our obsession with living forever," writes Prose, "means that we are doubly affronted by the spectacle of the obese, whose flesh seems to be making a statement that the pleasures of the moment have been chosen over the promise of longevity...
...We use words like compulsive and driven, which suggest that forces other than mere free will and sinfulness are what make us consume more than we need...
...Paul), William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman, besides Homer, Plutarch, Augustine, and St...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 22
