On his 25th birthday, Malcolm Ede decides to stay in bed. And there he remains for 20 years. Although it seems like a dead-end hook for a novel, David Whitehouse weaves a clever story from the lives of those surrounding Malcolm, from his unnamed younger brother - the narrator - to his parents, to the woman who has fallen so hopelessly in love with him that she camps in the family's front yard.
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All are trapped in the gravity well of Malcolm's considerable girth. In many ways, it is a tragedy. Nearly all the threads of this story involve personal loss, failing and unfulfilled promise. But Whitehouse's prose can provoke a few smiles, too, as he illustrates the routines of everyday life amid such bizarre circumstances.
In fact, this might be the book's biggest failing: it doesn't go anywhere fast, taking dozens of pages to describe an ordinary event or conversation that deserves only a few.
But the interactions of an otherwise unremarkable family, all of whose trajectories are irrevocably altered by the enormity of one central character's decision to embrace sloth, impel the reader onward.
