Published by Scribner on August 2, 2011
In a strange way, Bed asks whether love is a force of salvation or destruction. It may just be a question of perspective.
At the novel's center is the massive Malcolm, "the fattest man in the world." He doesn't -- he can't -- get out of bed; he and the bed have conjoined. After spending twenty years in bed, Mal has become a media sensation. Told from the point of view of Mal's unnamed brother, Bed jumps around in time, alternating scenes of Mal and his brother in their childhood and adolescence with events that occurred after Mal stopped rising from the bed in which he now dwells.
Why won't Mal get out of bed? In his early adulthood, after Mal leaves home to live with his girlfriend Lou, he proclaims his contempt for conventional lifestyles. He fears the mundane. It's ironic, given where he ends up, that Mal poses the rhetorical question "What will there be to remember of a mediocre existence?" Mal comes to believe that (as he says on his twenty-fifth birthday) he will be "just someone who was there, and that's it." He is gripped by a malaise so powerful he cannot see the purpose of life as a participatory experience. His conclusion -- "If you can't do what you're meant to do, why do anything at all?" -- explains his decision to stay in bed after his birthday party ends, but his reason for arriving at that conclusion remains unclear.
Depression may account Mal's initial reluctance to leave his bed (eventually, his size and the intermingling of his cellular structure with the bed itself makes it impossible for him to get up). Perhaps a mental illness more serious than depression is to blame. Long before he became morbidly obese, Malcolm was an odd child. He liked to stand in the rain with his face to the sky and his mouth open to the point of drowning. He preferred nudity to clothing, even at the supermarket. It's easy to understand why classmates wrote "Mal Ede is a weirdo" on the condensation-covered classroom windows on rainy days. Mal didn't care; he refused "to involve himself in the transient social systems of school." His weirdness was only beginning.
Mal wonders if his purpose "is to give purpose to others." His brother thinks Mal has always existed to give meaning to his mother's life. Delighted with her role as Mal's servant, Mal's enabling mother feeds him enough to sate a platoon. The novel raises an intriguing question: should Mal's mother be faulted for making him happy when her actions are probably contributing to an early death? A broader question that also applies to Lou is whether love means doing everything you can to make someone happy. Taking care of her father makes Lou happy even if it means sacrificing her own chance at a relationship. Lou's father sacrificed his own happiness to benefit a woman who ultimately left him; he learned that "a life lived in a way perceived to be correct could still come to nothing." Is David Whitehouse saying that love will find a way to destroy you in the end?
Bed is written tenderly, with affection for those (like Mal's mother) who deserve it and for those (like Mal) who probably don't. The story is in some respects touching, yet I often found it more depressing than enlightening. The final chapters initially seem life-affirming (perhaps some of us, at least, can discover a purpose in life that isn't self-destructive) and while I think it tries to be, the message that finally shines through is this: if you want to be loved, you need to be an invalid. There are moments of excellence here, snatches of wistful love stories that are beautifully rendered, but the novel's portrayal of heartbreak coupled with meaningless existence makes it difficult to read. It made me, like Mal, reluctant to get out of bed.
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