The book begins "It's unclear precisely when it became illegal to be fat", and this first sentence makes blindingly obvious the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor that is found throughout Fat. While the back of my copy proclaims it to be an incisive look at modern culture's obsession with appearance, it manages to fall just shy of being heavy-handed with its message -- though the message is undeniably present.

Fat consists of chapters alternating between the viewpoints of its three major characters -- Grenville Roberts, a TV chef; Hayleigh Griffin, a more-or-less "typical" teenager; and Jeremy Slank, a slick PR executive and in some ways the central character. Menus of their assorted meals are inserted every so often, as if to remind us that eating and the issues surrounding it are central to this book, but also interestingly highlighting the differences between the characters' situations.

The plot is fairly simple from each character's point of view, and is made interesting by its viewpoint on the national events happening in the background -- the government is launching various campaigns to fight the "obesity epidemic", notably the "Well Farms" which are essentially weight-loss camps (Grant perhaps deliberately removes any scope for violent Internet argument about the concept by himself mentioning Nazis and thus invoking Godwin's Law on it).

It is through Slank's infatuation with a research assistant on the Well Farm project that we are exposed to the book's message, in the form of the research assistant's rants about the validity of various health scares and accepted "facts" in the medical establishment. Grant attacks the link between smoking and lung cancer, the health effects of cholesterol, and myriad other ideas. Whether or not these rants have any basis in fact is questionable -- they vaguely cite studies, sure, but it's a novel, for heaven's sake -- but they do make you wonder about what you've been blindly accepting as the truth. And, in my opinion, that's always a good thing.

The message, though reasonably well conveyed, is not the main strength of Fat. Nor, frankly, is the plot -- it's adequate, and (crucially) funny, but no more. It is Grant's presentation of each chapter entirely from a character's point of view, not in the first person (which can get confusing) but nevertheless in their "voice", that is the novel's main strength -- it's done convincingly and enables us to sympathize with the characters. Echoing the message, it reminds us that others don't look at us the way we look at ourselves (thus it's a minor shock to be reminded that, for instance, Roberts is indeed grossly overweight or that Griffin is a genuine anorexic). Coupled with insightful (though sometimes jarring) humorous moments, it's quite a journey in each character's proverbial shoes. And, to be fair to all of them, they do grow somewhat through the book. So it wasn't really a surprise that, despite the original nature of the characters themselves (Slank is a self-obsessed twat; Griffin is a distilled stereotypeo of a pop-star-obsessed teen; Roberts is angry and bitter and has little self-control), I found myself cheering them on at the end.