American Book Review

It would be impossible to categorize Jamie Iredell's novel, The Fat Kid, in a brief review: a lyric ballad of a bullied boy; a small-town crime tale; an apocalyptic adventure; a time-hopping mystery; an ultra-violent rumination on nature and faith. The Fat Kid is a most timely work, if we consider the ravaging litany of both headline-making and less noted, but still notorious, male behavior that seems a particular hallmark of this moment in American history. Perhaps that's unfair to our age: terrible male behavior has always been an aspect of human life. Iredell makes this old news relevant through his manipulation of a host of narrative strategies and his penchant for genre-bending. And thank goodness for that; without the suspense of a fabulist plotline and abundant structural cleverness, this might seem like disturbing, but tiresome nightly news.

When a character—a brutish man, one of a collective of vicious and dumb men in the novel—gets drunk, slaps himself in the face, grunts like a gorilla, and plows headfirst into a kitchen wall after announcing, "Sometimes it's good to act like what you really are," I was fully in agreement with his self-assessment. Not that the behavior is admirable, [End Page 23] but that his nature was ugly. The men in this novel act like animals, and that's pretty much the point. Men can be violent, men can be stupid, men can be animals, now and forever, amen.

The novel begins its mini-chaptered descent with the backstory of the neglected and bullied eponymous character. We see his loveless, motherless childhood, the violent whims of his drunk abusive father, the Thin Man, and his first forays into unsettling and gruesome behavior, i.e. animal cruelty and pyromania and a nasty mix of both. The titled chapters are grouped in alternating sections focused on either The Fat Kid or The Thin Man, with occasional, mythopoetic interludes about a mysterious Machine, an otherworldly Maltese Falcon embodiment of white male privilege. The novel consistently asks readers to shift gears. At first it seems an intimate look at the Fat Kid's miseries at school, then it's The Thin Man's journey into a snowy wilderness (a Jack Londonesque tale of debauchery and cannibalism, paired with a battle of Mad Max-ish innovation and gore). Late in the novel, it feels like a mob story during the meticulous murder of each of the Fat Kid's cronies. The novel has the dynamics of a 1980's pop ballad, alternately quiet and bombastic, hilarious and repulsive and ultimately very sad—this might sound like an insult, but the tonal swings are deftly played.

This is a bloody novel; if you want to avoid scenes of red violence, this isn't your book. The physical grotesqueries of human frailty (and mortality) are fully on display. This is a novel of bodily fluids. At its most operatic level of violence, there is mass murder. At its most mundane level of disgust, there are simply the crumpled tissues and pornographic magazines that seem to litter every male character's home. These are not places any civilized human would want to live.

The novel is a stag party gone wrong; women are few. There's the Thin Man's mother, whose adultery repulses her son; a storekeeper's wife with limited speech; and, most notably, Sheri, a woman at the bar where the Fat Kid, the Thin Man, and the novel's core collection of lunks congregate. Sheri is a victim to every man she meets, and when she shows rare kindness to the Fat Kid and later becomes his lover, the victimization doesn't end. The novel's scarcity of women is deliberate. Iredell gives us a horrific world solely shaped by men.

Readers with a particular interest in dissections of toxic masculinity should read The Fat Kid. The consequences of violence are vivid, and no man is freed from moral responsibility, though...