Eat Me: A Review of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
by Alexandra Kleeman
Harper Collins
August 2015

“The summer I found out about the food chain, I was eight years old,” the narrator of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine tells us early in the novel. This logical arrangement of living organisms fascinated the young girl, not out of any nascent scientific curiosity, but rather a desire to find out “which animals living in entirely different continents or habitats, on land or in water or caves, could eat each other if put in the same place.” She finds something comforting in this vision of a world defined by who eats whom, not least because it’s a definition we can fit into: “I went to bed certain…that I would be eaten, too, someday, by something larger than me or maybe by many things much smaller.”

The novel is obsessed with bodies — with their visceral, pudgy, slimy reality — and their maintenance. As the narrator, A, asks: “Is it true that we are more or less the same on the inside?” But she quickly, coyly clarifies: “I don’t mean psychologically. I’m thinking of the vital organs, the stomach, heart, lungs, liver.” A leads a pretty good life in a safe and dull neighborhood, working as a proofreader for New Age Plastics magazine. But she hungers for something deeper, something more satisfying — she just doesn’t know what that is.

She does know that things are starting to get weird. A has a roommate, B, up to now just a minor annoyance who spends her days eating nothing but popsicles, drinking lemon-flavored vodka, and biting people. But B, discontent in her own life, is starting to look more and more like A — she even cuts off her hair and gifts a giant, oily braid to A, who is understandably creeped out. A then seeks comfort in the arms of her boyfriend, C, a totally normal dude with “a bland white good-looking face” who likes to watch stuff on TV: shark week, porn, a game show called “That’s My Partner!” that always ends in divorce or orgies (or both). And he’s always there to reassure A when her worries start to feel a little too psychotic. While she’s unsettled that her roommate seems bent on usurping her life, C tells her not to worry, that all humans are already pretty much the same anyways: “the genetic difference between the two of us comes down to something like eye color and whether or not we like the taste of cilantro.”

C is ok with this complete conformity because he’s an ideal member of the American economy. “He was a graceful consumer,” A reflects. “He could consume without being consumed in turn.” But things aren’t so easy for A, who sees a world where the products people buy might be more real than the people themselves. This comes out most sharply in A’s repeated musings on the many commercials that she watches, odd and surreal episodes that feel drawn from the collective unconscious of American ad-speak.

In one early commercial for a beauty cream, a woman grabs and peels off the surface of her face, revealing underneath “another face exactly like hers, but prettier.” The company’s slogan is “YOUR REAL SKIN IS WITHIN,” a wry parody of the advertising trope that claims a certain product can reveal the “real you,” as if the “you” watching the commercial is somehow an imposter. A seems keenly aware that this line of thinking is ultimately fruitless; she thinks that the woman should “want to stop here and start being happy with the way she newly is,” but she keeps peeling, revealing prettier and prettier faces until there’s nothing left.

But what’s more troubling is the possibility, which A can’t seem to shake, that she is not yet her true self, that she’s one purchase away from a state of perfection. Some of the novel’s quirks certainly seem to support that idea. For instance, the names (or lack thereof) of the three main characters seem to imply that the brands they buy are more real — more fleshed out, in this case — than they themselves are. What’s more, we know next to nothing about A’s appearance, while we’re given everything but the (nonexistent) floor plan to her favorite grocery store: “Every Wally’s had a similar feel inside…an organizing concept based on years of statistical data about purchasing preferences, the drift habits of purposeless customers: they were designed to baffle. The most sought-after items — candy bars, sandwich meat, milk — were placed in the most inaccessible parts of the store…in separate and distinct locations that were rotated every one, two, or three weeks in accordance with an obscure schedule developed by top management.”

Clearly this is a work of fiction, but one that captures the spirit of corporate America, the way it can feel that some executive somewhere is probably getting paid to figure out new ways to annoy and frustrate you, the way all stores need a “concept” now, an identity all their own. One of Kleeman’s most cutting insights is that in the modern era, companies don’t sell objects so much as ideas (e.g. cosmetics companies sell beauty, Facebook sells friendship, McDonalds sells heart disease), catering to vague and amorphous desires that we may barely realize we possess.

The notion that our desires are somehow incommensurate with the products that are meant to satisfy them is thematized in a commercial for Kandy Kakes, which center on their corporate mascot Kandy Kat’s endless, futile quest to eat a cake (like a surreal take on Trix rabbit). In this one, the cakes are pictured as real, 3-D objects while Kandy Kat remains a cartoon, the gag being that “no matter how hard he tried, Kandy Kat could never put a Kandy Kake down his throat: the two types of matter were fundamentally incompatible.” This is part of a larger Kandy Kake branding push, “centered around the point that Kandy Kakes were made of Real Stuff.” If, in the modern era, stores must sell concepts, than Kandy Kake sells reality. (Or, at least, the illusion of it. As we find out late in the novel, the Kakes are about the least real thing that’s still edible: “just chemicals, flour, aspartame, and some food-grade plastic.”)

But A doesn’t know the ingredients of her favorite snack food, just that its commercials speak to her deeply; she feels herself to be slipping away from reality, hungers for some unknown nourishment that might restore her to herself. In search of this, she sets off and arrives at the compound of a new religion. Or, actually, a religion/brand family/entertainment network/corporate conglomerate; this organization, called “The Church of the Conjoined Eater,” owns Kandy Kakes and all the other products A watches commercials for, owns the shows that surround those commercials, and owns the stores she goes to when she’s not watching the shows. In Pynchonesque fashion, this behemoth comes by the end of the novel to encompass basically the whole of American society, a money-making conspiracy disguised as a path to transcendence.

The Church is designed around a basic premise: some foods are “Bright” and others are “Dark,” and the former helps you become more truly yourself, while the latter prevents it. According to the Church, the discontent and disconnect that A experiences in her daily life results from not being able to differentiate between the two types; the Church promises this ability, holding out a more ideal future to possible converts: “imagine this, how radiant you become when you eat Bright. How beautiful, how durable and long-lasting.” Here, in a stroke of genius, the vocabulary of eastern mysticism and transcendence coincides with the modern language of branding, and the resultant irony here is multivalent — the Church certainly doesn’t believe what they preach, but that’s not to say that it’s completely wrong either.

All the Church’s talk about truth, about the “real you,” adds up to a clever distraction, designed to leave consumers in a continual state of not-quite satisfaction, ideal for buying products. As Wally’s, an arm of the Church, tells its customers, “feed a man a fish and he’ll imagine himself content, allow him to purchase a wide range of non-fish items and he will feed for days.” In the end, the Church is not interested in delivering true contentment, only in prolonging the feeding, in keeping us all willing consumers. They do this not out of greed, or envy, or any rational reason, but out of some deep, unknown urge, something akin to hunger. “A store is about something greater than selling,” one Wally’s employee tells A. “If you looked only at the surface of the word, you could say its primary purpose is storage. That surface is it’s core.” Not buying and selling, not making money, but storage, stasis, a continuation, a desire to keep living and growing and making consumers of us all.

But if a store’s purpose is merely to keep itself going, why do we keep going to them? If they hunger for our presence, need us like a body needs its cells, do we need them? There is held out a possible alternative — the company of other people. The true value of their company, the novel suggests, is that they satisfy a hunger for connection, reminding us of our reality when our material possessions don’t do the trick. After all, as A remarks, “borrowing brought you closer to people, while buying mostly made you feel more alone.”

That’s not the end of things though — friends aren’t a cure for consumerism, they’re part of the problem. The language of consumption infects everything in this novel, and friendship is no exception. “Even if someone wanted to use you, consume you,” as A thinks to herself at one point, “they at least wanted to consume the parts more specific to you, parts you needed to spend some time digging out.” If companies consider the “real you” to be the you who buys their products, to those around us we are only who we are, impossible as it is for us to be anything else. But in that case, we become merely another product, one choice on a shelf of potential relationships, all bright hued and eye catching, stretching to infinity.

This, then, is the terrain of the novel — caught between corporations, who want you to have no identity, and friends (like B) who want to take what identity you do have. Neither is a perfect solution to the other’s problems, but then, maybe that’s the point. For all the Church’s coopting of the language of transcendence, you can’t help but feel one small part of something much larger every time you buy something, part of a series of consumers stretching across the globe. This is not the food chain, but the chain of consumption — a chain that binds, even as it links.

It’s fair to say that this is hackneyed terrain. Corporations that are realer than people? A rerun of Citizens United. Products that no sane person would ever desire? SkyMall magazine did it first. Yes, what we know as “America” is really just the intersection of a few key factors — favorable tax codes, lenient government regulation, a population that never ceases to get a kick out of buying things — more than some grand locus of democracy and freedom. What else is new? For one, there’s Kleeman’s take on this sad state of affairs. It doesn’t tread new ground necessarily, merely surveys the landscape of contemporary culture and produces an easily-digestible image it. But if the content is familiar, the presentation isn’t — You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, like the best commercials, is garish, funny, flat-out weird, and more memorable than anything around it.