My father's diet

The teenage narrator of critic and translator West's accomplished debut has grown up almost entirely devoid of paternal guidance, but he's had it with his mother's weirdo boyfriend, so he seeks out his long-estranged father--and quickly winds up witness to one of the most explosive, insane midlife crises in recent literary history. First there's Dad's younger wife, Karen, who cajoles her husband into cofunding a holistic health center whose unappealing acronym "CESID" portends its inevitable failure. When divorce follows the center's implosion, Dad decides to enroll in the Body You Choose competition, a bodybuilding venture designed for late-blooming meatheads, which is exactly as sketchy as it sounds. The ensuing comedy of diets, supplements, estrogen blockers, and drug routines are Rabelaisian in their variety and extremity. And it's not like the narrator doesn't have his own problems, struggling to balance his lackadaisical French studies with work and his mostly-but-maybe-not-ex-girlfriend Fox; in the end, he can only register a fine mélange of pity and admiration of his father's newfound lease on life, as long as his father doesn't kill himself in the process. Tender, sardonic, and endearingly grotesque, this coming-of-age body horror makes easy work of the heavy lifting. (Feb.)

A young man weathers his hapless father's succession of self-improvement schemes. The narrator of West's dark, slim, emotionally precise debut novel is the product of a broken home: His parents divorced when he was 2, leaving him to navigate both of his parents' poor romantic choices. His mother has taken up with a blowhard ne'er-do-well he calls the Weirdo; his father, meanwhile, has married a woman determined to launch a New Age mindfulness spa despite her glum demeanor and poor business skills. The narrator isn't much of a success himself: He's failing French, a subject he's majoring in out of a vague urge to escape his Midwestern rut. But he hardly has the energy to blame anyone for his lassitude; in West's hands, this story isn't so much about family dysfunction as a sour kind of stasis in which nobody falls apart but nobody succeeds, either. Plotwise, this idea is encompassed in the diet of the book's title, as the narrator's father participates in a dubious competition to shift from pudgy middle-aged man to ripped gym rat in 12 weeks. But West's language does most of the work to convey this broken-down mood. The stepmom's cheeks have "the indelible, grainy blush of the experienced alcoholic"; strip-mall clerks, "leaning on counters or resting their elbows on tables, had uniform looks of despair"; the mindfulness class is disrupted by stomach rumbles. West is consistently poised on a very narrow line between blackhearted contempt for these characters and comic mockery of them. But because he never slips off that line, he generates a certain affection for his characters, even if it's clear how that body-transformation scheme is going to go. Everybody here is hard to love, but their good intentions, however misguided, make them easy to engage with. A crisp novel with plenty of momentum despite chronicling lives stuck in neutral. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.