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DNF at page 87. I cannot abide how grossly sexist and ableist this novel is.

Our protagonist is a fat chain-smoking alcoholic. Most of the early chapters are devoted to repeating his actual weight, his feelings about his weight, how many cigarettes he smokes and just how much he drinks; as if that's a substitute for being an actual character. At one point, he also reminisces about how the only way he got through a hard time in his life was by being a jerk to everyone around him.

I was already bored with him, but since I knew the point of the novel was his journey of self-discovery and improvement, I can see how he has to be a complete loser to start with. And that's not me fat-shaming him--the narrative is too busy doing that for me. His obesity is his personality.

So first we have the underlying sexism inherent in thinking this loser, this utterly mediocre-or-worse man, is worth telling a story about. I don't see any evidence of that.

But it gets worse, because nearly every female character so far in the book is defined by their breasts, their disabilities, or both. The only one to escape that is his mother, who was introduced immediately before she died and didn't get the breast assessment. The nurses at the hospital? Big breasts. Every woman he meets randomly? Big breasts. Every girl in every story he tells about the past? Big breasts. His neighbor who he played with as a child and meets again as an adult woman? Not so much about her breasts, but she does spend their entire first conversation with him defensively explaining how capable and clean and healthy she is despite her wheelchair. (That was a really uncomfortable scene, not just because of the insensitive treatment of the subject, but also because people simply don't talk that way. It was beyond stilted and awkward.)

His sister? Again, not quite so much about her breasts, though one past story about how much the protagonist hated her junior prom date skates pretty close to inappropriate, talking about how hot she looked. No, she has more development, I'll admit, but it's entirely about her mental illness--she hears a voice that sometimes encourages her to go somewhere odd, take off her clothes, and hold strange poses. But that's all I know about her, so yeah, she's completely defined by that mental illness.

I wanted to keep going until the actual plot of the story began, the bike-trip across the country that transforms him (somehow) into a better person. But I didn't make it that far, because soon after that childhood bike reenters his life, he passes out after riding it drunkenly a short (ie, non-cross-country) distance and wakes up near a community Little League game. The local Catholic priest was attending, and gets him to the hospital to get checked out, and takes him back to the church to rest afterward.

The next scene is actually one of the worst things I've read in my life. The priest, who has literally just met the protagonist, goes on a long, winding, bitter confessional story about how he became attracted to a divorcee in his congregation and eventually asked her sexually explicit questions over the phone, which she started recording partway through and later used to get him into trouble. The priest is also a breast man, apparently, because this is one of the actual things he told the protagonist he said to the woman:

"Why don't you, why don't you take off the rest of your clothes so your full, ripe breasts can cool off?"

It's not even just that his behavior was inappropriate that bothers me. It's that the author thinks this is a story a priest would tell someone he's literally just met and knows nothing about. It's an echo of the same problem from the protagonist and his wheelchair-using neighbor: they're sitting on the porch together after his parents' memorial and apropos of nothing she's hyper-defensive about her disability, laboriously explaining her capabilities and routines. People don't talk that way. People don't immediately spill their secrets or explain their lives to near-strangers on a whim. Unless they're drunk at a bar and need to rant, but even then, these aren't the conversations they'd be having.

I need a shower.