The Fat Girl (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“The Fat Girl” was published in 1977 as part of Dubus’s short story collection Adultery, and Other Choices. It has become one of Dubus’s best-known works.

Throughout Dubus’s career, critics have praised his writing for his sensitive treatment of topical issues, such as abortion, infidelity, drugs, racism, and eating disorders. In fact, his stories have included characters like single mothers, divorced husbands, and abused wives.

Many of Dubus’s stories focus on the turbulence of male-female relationships. Edith Milton, writing for the New Republic, viewed Adultery, and Other Choices as an exploration of the relationships between men and women. “I can think of no one,” she writes, “who has drawn a more precise map of that no-man’s land between the sexes than he has in this collection.”

Other reviewers lauded the collection for its deft portrayals of the individual’s search for identity. For example, J. N. Baker of Newsweek asserted that Dubus examined this familiar theme with “fresh perception and style.”

Mary Soete, writing for Library Journal, also noted Dubus’s knack for picking significant moments in the lives of his characters. “He presents moments of necessity and choice,” she wrote, “in the inner lives of his men and women with precision, truth, and love.”

Frances Taliaferro, who called Dubus a “skillful and temperate writer,” acknowledged that Adultery, and Other Choices “takes some getting used to,” but that “Dubus invites us into a world of quiet melodies. Gradually the ear learns to hear them.” Taliaferro particularly liked Dubus’s depiction of small-town America.

With his story entitled “The Fat Girl,” Dubus raised complex issues of body image and identity. Critics generally praised the story. Milton asserts that Louise emerges “triumphantly human” in her understanding that anyone who truly loved her would find her true self underneath her layers of fat.

Baker also deemed the story as “the collections’ exquisite prize.” This reviewer saw Louise’s actions at the end as an example of her “rebellious resolution” against the “charade of her existence.”

Anatole Broyard, writing for the New York Times, also considered “The Fat Girl” to be the most successful story in the collection. He alludes to Louise’s loss of identity when he writes that when thin, Louise is “only a mannequin of other people’s expectations.”

Steve Yarborough, writing in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, further discussed the story in terms of its narrative style, not its emotional content. Yarborough maintains that “The Fat Girl” was one of the “notable stories” in Dubus’s “compressed novels.” He writes,

The compressed novel seems to be the ideal form for Dubus. ... It allows him to probe . . . deeply into the characters . . . and . . . forge a dramatic narrative, something the shorter, ‘formless’ stories do not do.