Berg's collection of short stories features suffering women, with a theme of food running through all of them.  A few stories are about the agony of dieting and being overweight.  Many of them have narrators avowing the great pleasure of fattening unhealthy food.  Other stories feature older women, either in marriages or as widows, still struggling with their situations.  In most of the stories, the women push against conventional expectations — about what they should eat, how they should look, and how they should grow old.  Sometimes the tone is one of apoplectic but smothered anger, especially when the narrators are talking about their body weight.  At other places, the tone is warmer, with the women grudgingly coming to terms with their lives.  Berg focuses on the everyday details of life, and there is always a touch of comedy in the observations about their experiences.   The setting is middle America, with people leading conventional lives, preoccupied by food and their relationships.  Berg's characters have fairly ordinary insights about their lives, and not a great deal happens in the stories.  When the stories work, they are entertaining and touching; when they don't, they are tiresome and aggravating.   

© 2008 Christian Perring                   

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Keywords: eating, Americans, women