[In the following review, Monaghan praises Akst's St. Burl's Obituary as "ingenious and thought-provoking."]

St. Burl's Obituary starts out like a thriller. The hero, Burl Bennett, savoring his approaching meal, enters a New York Italian restaurant where he brushes by a small, intense man who looks as if "he must have just killed somebody." And indeed he has. In the dining room are three bodies, victims of a Mafia rubout. The staff is in the kitchen, cowering face down on the floor.

But despite this opening, the novel is only tangentially a thriller. Rather, it is a map of the contemporary world, a black comedy that carries Burl, fearfully fleeing the Mafia, into the belly of the American beast. A newspaperman specializing in thoughtful obituaries, Burl is also a writer who has been working on an epic poem, in Dantesque terza rima, about the killing of Mormon leader Joseph Smith in Illinois. (There are echoes throughout the novel of Dante and The Divine Comedy). Burl's descent into Hell retraces Smith's journey from Palmyra, N.Y., where Mormonism was founded, to Nauvoo, Ill. Then Burl pushes on, as the Mormons did, to Utah, the American utopia.

But neither is this picaresque journey the main business of Akst's book. At its core is Burl's personal Purgatory, a feverish wrestling match with his immense appetite, a mystery in its own right because his parents are so thin and abstemious. The novel lavishes continuous loving detail on Burl's prodigious meals at restaurants and at home. Fat drips, sugar abounds, the scale groans. Burl is the American consumer par excellence.

In Utah, Burl discovers his own utopias. The first is friendship with Engel, the son of Mormon immigrants from the island of Tonga. In Tonga, the royal family is admired for its fatness. Engel, derided by a relative as "Mr. Tongan Culture, the Franz Fanon of the islands," is deeply unhappy because he himself weighs only 150 pounds (his German grandfather, he believes, "polluted the gene pool, man"). Engel gives the ever more adipose Burl the nickname "Rex" and worships him for his greasy bulk. Miraculously, Burl has discovered a place where the ordinary world's distaste for fatness is turned on its head.

But the friendship ends badly, as Engel's interest in Burl turns out to be mainly sexual. (Not the least hint of homophobia here, by the way.) Burl continues his gargantuan eating. The apotheosis of all his meals is dinner at a restaurant called The Grail. It takes eight pages to savor. Guided by his waitress, Wanda, he consumes, among other courses, scallops atop a tomato concasse with fresh basil; a whole foie gras in an Armagnac and quince sauce; Maine lobster "shelled and reassembled with beurre scented with ginger and lime"; filet of Utah beef; risotto Milanese with grated truffles; and lamb cooked in a thick crust of kosher salt, flour and thyme. We won't discuss the veggies, desserts and wines, but Akst labors hard and makes them all sound delicious.

Back in his motel called the Chrysalis, Burl continues to gobble food, growing wider and wider. Finally, he is so fat he gets stuck in the door of his room, and the fire department is summoned to cut him out. A butterfly of sorts emerges from this Chrysalis, as Burl is transported to a hospital where, as warning signs point to his imminent demise, his stomach is stapled. His days as a fatty are over—science has conquered gluttony.

There is one more, nutty utopia to come. The slimmed down Burl is taken into a feminist commune led by Janet David Witness, an obvious parody of the religious mini-movement led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. The Witness movement is yet another cult of personality in the great American tradition. Burl, a virgin when the book opens, gets his fill of sex from his charming commune companion, Wanda, who had been his waitress at the great feast. It soon becomes evident, however, that Wanda's main interest like that of the Witness movement, is procreation. ("The alternative," Wanda explains, "is Shakerdom. People would remember us for our furniture.") Once his work as stud leads to an apparently fruitful outcome, Burl is shown the door.

His encounters with the Scylla of homosexuality and the Charybdis of radical feminism behind him, his appetite curbed by science, his very appearance altered, our hero returns to New York from his Western odyssey under the alias Abe Alter. As the book draws to a culmination, he finds courage, settles his business with the mob, discovers the genetic reason for his raging appetite, regains his identity as Burl Bennett, makes peace with his parents, and settles down to the Paradise of a normal married life.

With its delicately handled echoes of Dante, and its unblinking look at contemporary America, St. Burl's Obituary is ingenious and thought-provoking. But the book is in no way difficult reading. Bizarre and ambitious the plot may be, but Akst tells his tale in no-nonsense, journalistic prose that keeps the story moving at a swift clip. It goes down as easily as cotton candy, one of the few foods that Burl Bennett does not down in this epic of consumption.