Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Crutcher, Chris. (1993). Staying fat for Sarah Byrnes. New York: Greenwillow Books, 216 pp.

Fiction, ALA Best Book for YA, 1995 (among many others)

Staying Fat is the story of Eric Calhoune, a high school swimmer better known as "Moby," a moniker as descriptive of his size as his aquatic tendencies. Sarah Byrnes is Eric's best friend, a fierce and guarded girl horribly disfigured by severe burns over her hands and face. When Eric gets involved in athletics, Sarah worries that he'll sleek down and skip out, so Eric begins eats "like two pigs instead of just one" and demonstrates his loyalty by staying fat for Sarah. Eric's dedication to Sarah becomes the focal point of the story. After Sarah ends up in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, conscious but mute and unresponsive, Eric vows to find out the truth about Sarah's condition and help her out of it. Along the way, he has to negotiate a number of personal obstacles, including confrontations with swimmates, the dogged vice-principle Mr. Mautz (Lambeer changed his name and got an administrative job!), and Sarah's father, a new relationship, and his own beliefs.

Crutcher constantly has about six balls in the air throughout this entire story, but I was impressed with the way he made his juggling act really work. No topic is off-limits in Staying Fat, and I think it's an immensely important book because it gives voice to the tough issues that adolescents have to think about and deal with. There's no tucking them politely into corners or pushing them under the bed; Crutcher drags us right into the middle of a class in "Contemporary American Thought," where the students are asked to consider religion, abortion, suicide, the way in which values shape individual beliefs, and the importance of responding rationally to the coexistence of competeing perspectives. Outside the classroom, Sarah Byrnes provides a way to talk about abuse, familial relations, handicaps and disabilities, and respect of all types of diversity. This book shares a lot of thematic similarites with Deadline, especially as it addresses school hierarchy and religious conservatism and blurs the boundaries between right and wrong. Personally, I can appreciate the points Crutcher makes, but I occasionally feel that he comes across a little too much as writing with a liberal bias. The questions he raises definitely point students toward a higher level of thinking that asks them to probe and evaluate why they believe as they do, but as I read, I also felt that he, too, was urging me to believe in a certain way, which I think, generally speaking, is counterproductive to his aims.

Ah, classroom use. I wouldn't do it. If Dr. Goering's horror stories about martial action against teacher teaching it weren't enough to convince me of that, reading it myself certainly was. As I said earlier, it's not that it isn't an important or valuable thing for students to experience. On the contrary, it is. However, it is too controversial--not only for parents and administrators, but also for students in the classroom. There is no way to discuss this book without discussing the issues it addresses, and given the way these discussions tended in Mrs. Lemry's fictional class, I would not be comfortable refereeing that kind of an ideological or philosophical free-for-all among my students. I would maybe consider recommending it to an older student, but I don't think I would keep it in my classroom library. If one of my students were to read it, I would want to make sure that it was his or her own decision.

Definitely high school. Language, tough issues, disturbing situations. If you think about it too much, it can be a hard story to read.

I really liked Staying Fat a lot. In the first few chapters, I wasn't sure about it because (if anyone reads this, I'm going to come to class to find a burning effigy of me) sometimes I'm not that crazy about Crutcher's style. Nevertheless, I eventually found that I couldn't stop reading it, and that doesn't happen to me too often. The plot was really engaging, and I liked the way it almost took on the feel of a mystery about halfway through the book. There are also a slew of compelling characters. The reader feels for Eric and Sarah, of course, but I found myself really drawn to Mrs. Lemry, Eric's friend Ellerby, and the coarse and unlikely hero Dale Thornton, who starts out basically looking to kick Eric and Sarah's asses but ends up saving them in more ways than one. Just as in Deadline, there's an awful lot going on in terms of characters who have skeletons in their closets, but for some reason I found them to be incorporated more believably in this story. I give it a 4 out of 5. Good book.