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William Leith
Bloomsbury 2008
This is William Leith’s sequel to his autobiographical account of his struggle with overeating, The Hungry Years. Food isn’t the problem now – but just about everything else is. Worries about his health, verging on hypochondria,,and reflections on his recently ended relationship with the mother of his child, lead Leith onto more general ruminations about the breakdown of society and, in particular, the financial disaster which has moved on apace since the book was first published, making Leith seem prescient to say the least. It’s a disturbing and miserable – and the hilarity which Jon Ronson claims for it on the cover regretfully passed me by. That said, it’s an interesting read, deceptively tightly structured (just one of the ways that it is better than his previous book, incidentally) and very well-written – although occasionally the “very long sentence over a couple of pages to suggest mental anguish” device does get a little wearing. Bits I found particularly memorable included his account of the poignancy that always filled the last week of his school summer holidays, and the parallel he draws between the Easter Islanders’ extermination of their island trees to make ever bigger statues and our own society’s pursuit of ever more “prestigious” status symbols, in the process “exploiting everybody in sight, and hating ourselves ... sucking resources from the earth”. Leith appears to be a painfully honest writer, and much of this is certainly painfully personal; it’s thus not a cheering read, but it is well wirth a look.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/31/britishidentity.biography
14th March 2009
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