SOURCE: "Shedding the Weight of the Past," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 11, 1996, p. 8.

[In the following review, Lindh lauds Akst's St. Burl's Obituary as "a remarkable novel."]

In St. Burl's Obituary, Daniel Akst has crafted a remarkable novel that gives life to Cyril Connolly's adage that "imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out."

The protagonist, Burl Bennett, is marooned inside a morbid obesity. A prolonged celibate, his only joy occurs with fork in hand. Burl, 35, writes obituaries for a New York newspaper, and he ascribes all sensations to taste. On the way to repast, he imagines the fare:

He would have the fried squid in hot sauce, a Caesar salad, clams in that gray salty broth so good you used bread to sop up the liquor, and finally the veal saltimbocca, slender elegances of flesh blanched in wine...