One of Thomas Wolfe’s novels is titled You Can’t Go Home Again. Perhaps a better title, for those of us Americans who have spent decades living away from the United States, would be “You Shouldn’t Go Home Again.” Even though I have no intention, ever, of living there again, I continue to take an interest in America’s many peculiarities and cannot shake the habit of referring to it as “home.” Perhaps this is no more than language and the sense of union with the place where one’s mother tongue is spoken, perhaps it’s nothing more than a shared sense of humor, though it might well be nothing more than a habit of speech.
Each time I go there, however, I am struck by an ever stronger sense of having landed in the wrong place, for I find myself surrounded by members of some other species, as though the body snatchers had invaded while I was away and left replicants in place of the people who were there when I left. My native language is still spoken there but formulaic slogans, relentless friendliness, and endless repetitions of “like” and “I mean” delay the realization that Americans’ words are too often devoid of any genuine content.
But my sense of alienation grows strongest when I am faced with their size. Americans are fat, but fat in a way that is peculiar to them, as though a race of hermaphrodites had been squeezed out of a pastry bag and badly smoothed into shape with a giant spatula, then stuffed into low-crotched jeans and tent-sized T-shirts before being given bad haircuts and sent on their way. I am haunted by the fear that, were I to touch one of them, my fingers would sink in up to the second joint and come out oily.
The early fathers of the Christian church devoted much of their time and argumentation to the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” and it is this concept that comes to mind when I view these acres of flesh: from what source has all of this mass been transubstantiated if not from what they eat? And what would one have to consume, and in what quantities, to produce this apparently endless bulk? A quick run through a supermarket, however, shows miles of shelves holding fat-free, low-fat, cholesterol-free, hi-this, low-that products, stretching out toward the ever diminishing horizon of slenderness, and restaurants have taken to printing the calorie or fat content of items on the menu. It must, then, be in the other aisles that the raw materials of this bulk lie lurking and in the perpetual grazing that is visible wherever Americans foregather. Imagine my surprise, in a country where adults blanche at the idea of putting cream in coffee and where “no sweet” and “sugar free” are part of a child’s basic vocabulary, to discover the new sizing system for clothing, where the potential embarrassment of a large number, which might suggest large size, has been replaced by the letter X, repeated as often as are the numbers after the decimal point in pi.
It is their obsessive interest in and praise of thinness that makes the size of Americans such a paradox. Were it socially desirable, even acceptable, to be fat, then their eating habits and girth would make sense. But what public figure wants to be fat? Indeed, which of them is? Travel beyond the anorectic canyons of Manhattan shows that rich people are thin and poor people are fat. But how can this be true in a country where poverty is believed to have been eliminated?
“Denial” is a term currently popular among American speakers of psychobabble. As best I can make out, it means doing one thing while believing you are doing the opposite. A more serious-minded or better-qualified observer than I might suggests that Americans are in denial—ah, what an unpleasant phrase—not only about their size but also about their politics, their place in the world, and their economic future. These, however, are not subjects upon which I find it pleasant to comment other than to say that magic thinking is often a large component in every nation’s idea of its place in the world. Perhaps it is because Americans are a practical, literal-minded people that they have chosen to give the world such a visible example of the way they think, the way they are.
Thomas Wolfe’s best-known book is Look Homeward, Angel. I think not.