I don’t know that I enjoyed reading this book, but it got under my skin with its exploration (and conflation) of hunger and consumption, the natural versus the artificial, and what is real versus what is façade. In the world imagined in the novel, beauty products are edible, and the most popular snack food, Kandy Kakes, is completely synthetic. A local man is moved to action when he learns of the inhumane treatment of veal calves, but the culture’s relationship to food is so dysfunctional that the only way he sees he can save the veal is by buying and eating as many cutlets as he possibly can. A cardboard figure of him ends up being used as an advertisement for veal at Wally’s, the area grocery store chain, which might strike the reader as ironic, but somehow makes sense in the context of the novel. I think for me the image that made the most lasting impression is one of deprivation. Kandy Kat, the cartoon mascot for Kandy Kakes, is on an endless, futile quest for the snack food, which always cruelly eludes him. He is repeatedly described as emaciated, ribs visible through his skin, weak and desperate. He is mirrored in the book’s main female characters, who are obsessed with being thin and angular and limit their food intake to a painful degree, surviving on oranges and popsicles. At the same time, they are equally fixated on cosmetics and skin care products and the transformations they promise. Amid all of this turmoil over nourishment and the internal and external, the concept of individual identity seems to be dissipating. The three primary characters are named A, B, and C, interchangeable points in a love triangle. The narrator, A, describes a recent phenomenon, the “Disappearing Dads,” men who mysteriously vanish from their families and are later found in another life more or less indistinguishable from their own, seemingly unaware that anything has happened. A popular reality TV show challenges couples to correctly identify their partners among a group, and the success rate is dismal. A joins what is essentially a cult, “The Church of the Conjoined Eater,” which takes this idea of erasing identity to its extreme. Even after all of the oddness that preceded it, this development was a bit much for me, and I don’t think I really got it. Still, the book offers a lot to think about with regard to consumer culture. Is anything we’re being sold really going to sustain us, or is it all as fake as the plastic food dangling from the ceiling at Wally’s?