An Ideal for Living by Marshall Moore

Title: An Ideal for Living
Author: Marshall Moore
Publisher: Lethe Press
Length:: Novel/215 pages
Buy the book: Amazon , ebook

Blurb:

Grace White and her brother Robert, overweight and affluent, are desperate to hang onto their respective love interests. Grace’s husband Rich is bonking every woman he can talk into bed. Grace is willing to look beyond his affairs if she can just have her marriage back. Robert’s law school fling James’s interest diminished as Robert’s waistline increased, but Robert has never moved on. The only solution? Losing those excess pounds… by any means necessary. And when James finds a supernatural healer who can sculpt living flesh like clay, beautiful ugliness ensues. Will Robert and Grace get what they want, or what they deserve? In An Ideal for Living, Marshall Moore has written a shocking fantastique, a novel that captures the Zeitgeist of contemporary urban life, where beauty is a commodity craved, consumed, and traded.

Review:

In one of the pivotal scenes towards the end of An Ideal for Living, the main character Robert wonders what the cost of perfection could be. He’s told that he can afford it. This single statement causes both Robert and the reader to wonder just what they’d pay for physical perfection and beauty. The final answer of Robert’s cost sets up a stunningly fabulous ending that is inventive, fascinating, and creepy all at once. While I didn’t always like the characters in Moore’s book, I can’t deny that they are great studies of humanity that come alive with snappy dialogue and harsh lights of reality.

The story follows two wealthy, obese siblings when they decide to change their lives. Robert is gay with an unrequited crush on his friend, the beautiful Latin James. Grace is a housewife desperate to cling to her disdainful husband, a man sleeping with anything that moves. Both Robert and Grace are filled with eloquent and unrelieved self loathing for their lives and bodies. They hate themselves for how they look, how they act, and most of all both feel they deserve whatever pathetic life they sink into even while miserable. While James turns Robert onto a spiritual healer that has the pounds melting away from his overweight frame, Grace crash diets on pills and exercise. When Grace finally meets the healer Stephan for herself, the price of beauty becomes startling clear.

The action is mostly character driven as the book follows both Robert and Grace’s path to beauty equally. Both are grossly overweight and have given up on diets, exercise, and any fads after trying them all. Grace especially is a study of self loathing and failure as she talks about the various ways she’s tried to loose weight from diets to trying to contract diseases in third world countries. She’s afraid of surgery or would have been there already, multiple times. Instead she drowns herself in alcohol while spying on her cheating husband. Her internal monologue is fresh, eye catching, and often vulgar. Her behavior is pathetic for most of the book and she knows it but seems powerless to stop herself and change. It’s only at the end when her real strength is shown that Grace emerges as a strong, powerful woman she always was.

Here I found Grace sometimes hard to read as I empathized with her mother’s voice in her head (minus the overly shrewish, destructive delivery). I wanted Grace to snap out of her clinging but her journey is still fascinating to watch. Robert is a slightly more sympathetic character as he’s accepted his unhappy life but seems to lack the self awareness of how miserable he is. Just as he’s realizing he hates his life he’s also undergoing body changes from the spiritual healer so his path is not as touched by the same deep hatred and self loathing as Grace’s. The flip side to this is Robert’s cost is much greater and his decisions really create a powerful dynamic.

The pace is incredibly quick with snappy dialogue and fully developed characters. The writing is often eye catching, keeping your attention glued to the page even as the characters and situations may not be enjoyable. Grace and Robert are total train wrecks but whether they redeem themselves or give into society’s obsession with beauty is up to the reader to decide. Moore has delivered a well written and clever vehicle to challenge and entertain readers. While not something I’d want to read again, it stands out like an urban legend or cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for.