Sarai Walker's Dietland and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train feature difficult heroines who start off weak and gradually gain strength throughout their respective stories.
In Dietland we follow Plum Kettle, a woman of about 30 who weighs 300 pounds. Plum has been overweight her whole life and copes by ignoring the stares and rude comments of strangers, obsessively dieting, and fixing her hopes on the life she will have after she undergoes gastric bypass surgery and becomes the "real", thin version of herself. After circumstances throw her into the path of Verena Baptist, the daughter of Eulayla Baptist, a woman famed for creating the "Baptist diet plan", Plum stars to rethink her entire approach to life. Verena, who rejected her mother's fraudulent and unsafe diet empire, promises to give Plum a check for $20,000--to use on the surgery, or anything else--if Plum follows Verena's "new Baptist plan", which includes standing up to strangers who stare at her and buying attractive clothes that fit her.
This description of Dietland probably makes the book sound like it's a feel-good beach read about accepting one's body. It's not. The last thing it is is touch-y, feel-y. There is a secondary plot that involves what can only be described as a feminist terrorist group that goes by the name "Jennifer" (because the name is so common--it could be "any woman in your life"). This group does things like kidnap rapists, torture them for months, and then drop their bodies out of airplanes. They blackmail British tabloids into replacing images of nude or scantily-clad women with images nude, aroused men. They kidnap an imam and, on television, force him to tell the men of his religion to pour acid into their eyes rather than force women to cover their heads and bodies. You get the picture.
While the story is about Plum's transformation from beaten-down fat girl who loathes herself to a freer woman who can walk the streets unashamed, there is still a heavy note of sadness weighing down this novel. Plum finds her chosen family in the women of Calliope House, but she doesn't find acceptance in the world at large. In fact, Plum's self-acceptance does not arise in spite of the world's hatred of her body, but because of it. By being 300 pounds, Plum figures that she gets to see people's true selves: if she were skinny, people who treat her decently while treating fat women like the scum of the earth. Plum finds that she would rather be fat and hated that well-liked by the very people who get their jollies by humiliating fat people. It's a dark--if very truthful--thesis to a difficult, entertaining, complicated book. Also of note: men barely exist in Dietland except to humiliate or reject Plum. While she finds her band of sisters, there are no men who also reach enlightenment. It's a very separatist perspective, and one I don't entirely buy into.
Likewise, The Girl on the Train features an absolute mess of a heroine. Rachel is in her early-thirties, divorced, overweight, alcoholic, and just incredibly sad and lacking in personal direction. As she rides the train every morning and evening, she makes up a story about the lives of a beautiful couple whose house she can see from the train--she dubs them "Jess" and "Jason". But then one day she sees an indiscretion that explodes her perfect view of the couple and she begins an obsessive--and dangerous--investigation to find out what's really going on. Her sleuthing is complicated by the fact that she has a tendency to black out for hours at a time when she's drinking.
The Girl on the Train has been compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl for obvious reasons: they both tell the same story from multiple perspectives, they both have unreliable (and "unlikeable" protagonists), they both involve themes of betrayal, violence, and the dark side of marriage. I personally think Gone Girl is the better book--it's sharper, better written. The Girl on the Train gets a bit repetitive after a while, and Rachel is bland and gray compared to the acidic glow of Gone Girl's Amy Dunne. But The Girl on the Train is highly entertaining and genuinely keeps you guessing. It doesn't reveal all the cards until the very end. It's also very realistic in its portrayal of alcoholism. Author Hawkins isn't afraid to have Rachel vomit, piss herself, cry, fuck up over and over. You never hate her, but you seriously pity her--which is worse, in some ways. Hawkins has big, brass ovaries for never turning Rachel's alcohol problem into something sexy and glamorous. Unlike other hard-boiled fiction with detectives or PIs who keep a bottle of rye along with a handgun on them at all times, this amateur investigator's antics are very sad and unsexy to read about.Neither Dietland nor The Girl on the Train hit the sweet spot 100% of the time for me, but they're both really good, solid reads. Dietland is especially fascinating in its uncompromising anger at a society that treats women's bodies like public property, to be jeered at, or jacked off to, depending on how "hot" said body is. It was a cathartic book, if nothing else. The Girl on the Train is the perfect read for, well, a train ride (or plane or car ride). It sucks you in and leaves you turning pages for hours. So although neither book is perfect, they're both worth your time.
Dietland: B+
The Girl on the Train: B
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