My Father's Diet

‘My Father’s Diet, Adrian Nathan West’s debut novel, is slim, sad, comic and sharply observed . . . West’s achievement, in this subtle and delightful book, is to have rendered failure in strikingly handsome terms.’ Christopher Shrimpton, The Guardian ---- ‘This debut offers an acute, painfully funny front-row view of a midlife crisis in action.’ Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal ---- ‘Compact and stirring, [ . . . My Father’s Diet] showcases the recognizable confusion of a changing world.’ Patrick Nathan, New York Times Book Review ---- ‘Our narrator is a product of malls, low-status jobs and faded dreams, and West’s wry, precise tone captures the monotony and inertia of his daily life. But what could have been a cruel satire is elevated by his empathy for his characters and an outlook that’s compassionate rather than condescending.’ Alastair Mabbott, The Herald ---- ‘West’s writing is acute and at times brilliant. His descriptions of bodies that have been transformed into objects of devotion, especially, are luminous and imaginative, often humorous too . . . [My Father’s Diet] is a book of subtle wit and poignancy, the scope of which is far greater than its brief length would suggest.’ Lamorna Ash, Literary Review ---- ‘West has a sharp pen, capable of saying a lot with small details, and the characters feel like fully realised human beings.’ Joshua Rees, Buzz ---- ‘Tender, sardonic, and endearingly grotesque, this coming-of-age body horror makes easy work of the heavy lifting.’ Publishers Weekly ---- ‘West’s dark, slim, emotionally precise debut novel 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.’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ---- 'Imagine a precise, refined eye looking at all the grotesque realities of mall life in Middle America and you'll have a sense of My Father's Diet. It's as if the Joyce of Dubliners were looking at Akron.' Edmund White ---- 'My Father's Diet is a wry and blisteringly honest indictment of American grotesquery. It is also - miraculously - tender about the unwinnable game of masculinity in this country. I loved this book for its humour, its clarity, its wicked prose. Adrian Nathan West is a star.' Lauren Groff ---- 'My Father's Diet is a strange, funny, sad, and wonderful novel. With the precision of a translator who has very good taste, West captures the bizarre vividness of America better than anyone I've ever read.' Lauren Oyler ---- 'Adrian Nathan West, one of our best translators, is also one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial - sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion - that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture - of the patrimony - that we, all of us, have ruined.' Joshua Cohen ---- 'In My Father's Diet, Adrian Nathan West does what the giftless memoirists cannot: he alchemizes experience into art. Here is a rare book not only for sons and their fathers but for any reader who still cares about the reach of sentences well made.' William Giraldi ---- 'Very sardonic, insightful and surprisingly tender.' Alice Fisher, The Portobello Bookshop Edinburgh ---- 'Being mindful in America, West suggests, is not to invite wisdom, but to cultivate a boredom that turns even the nation's lunacy into something as rote as weather.' Jeremy Lybarger