David Whitehouse |
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Reviews For BED
The Guardian - 22 July 2011
David Whitehouse has caught, through a debut novel that is as soulful as it is funny, the claustrophobia, tenderness, jealous resentment and horror of living under the same roof as your parents. The endless plates of food, the enforced intimacies, the love-in-spite-of-itself. He evokes the impotent loneliness of the narrator, his disgusted fascination with the spreading lump of his silent, mainly sleeping brother and his growing sexual frustration with candour and wit. Read the full article
The Daily Mail - 17 June 2011
Forty-five-year-old Mal is the heaviest man in the world. He's bed-bound - it takes three of them to support him - and his sheets have long since grown into his skin. To look at, he's "like an enormous meat duvet". The walls of his parents' bungalow have been knocked through around him, his father has retreated to the loft, and his pathologically devoted mother has gone to a trailer-home. So how has Mal's brother ended up, broken-hearted and broken-legged, back in the same room? This original novel moves back and forth between the momentous 7,483rd day of Mal's lie-in and the years preceding it. Read the full article
The Scotsman - 10 June 2011
Mal is astonishing. He eschews clothes, sometimes disrobing during a dull lesson at school. Charismatic, he's opposed to doing anything that's expected and eschews all that's mediocre. He says, "Maybe one day you realise that everything you thought was coming to you, everything you'd been promised, just isn't going to happen. And maybe when you realise that, maybe settling down is just what happens. Maybe that's when you admit defeat." Read the full article
The Independent - 11 June 2011
A slightly surreal story about Mal, who's an extraordinary child until one day he takes to his bed and doesn't get up again, becoming the fattest man in the world. 'He's an extremely vivid firework of a character,' says Greg. Read the full article
The Independent - 9 June 2011
Almost three years ago now, David Whitehouse, a then 26-year-old journalist with aspirations of becoming a novelist, handed in his notice at a men's magazine, and started to write a book about a man so disillusioned with life that he takes permanently to his bed where, over two decades, he grows into the world's fattest man. Whitehouse sent out the first few chapters of what he was now calling Bed to the only literary agency he had heard of, William Morris in London, and was quickly picked out of the slush pile. Read the full article
The Independent - 3 June 2011
An author will stage a bed-in tomorrow, not in the name of anything as old-fashioned as love and peace, though. Rather David Whitehouse will sit in a bed to publicise his debut novel, Bed (it was, unsurprisingly, his publisher's idea), inside or outside London's Southbank Centre, depending on the weather. Sounds cool, I suggest, weakly. "It might be cool in your own bedroom," he says, "but when you write a book, you don't think anyone's going to read it, and when it's going to be published, you don't think you are going to be lying in a bed, in pyjamas, in public... I hope the bed's inside." In either event, he'll be wearing thermals underneath his branded red-and-white striped pyjamas. Read the full article
The Times, Kate Saunders
Mal Ede has been lying in bed for 20 years and is now the fattest man in the world. "He has spread out so far from the nucleus of his skeleton," his younger brother says, "he is an enormous meat duvet." Mal's 100-stone body and the machinery required to keep it alive have literally driven the rest of the family out of the house and into a trailer in the back garden. His younger brother has spent a lifetime in Mal's shadow. As a child Mal ruined pantomimes and family holidays by suddenly tearing off all his clothes and running amok. As a handsome teenager he won the heart of Lou, the girl adored by his brother. And now Mal has turned their lives into a media circus. "Mal's death is the only thing that can save this family," the brother sadly says, "because his life has destroyed it." Hilarious and tragic; a perfectly brilliant debut.
Booktrust
Whitehouse has an eye for the one-liner, for the particularly gruesome turn of phrase and for comedy that is both unspoken, physical and witty. Read the full article
Timeout, Kim Taylor Bennett
The 30-year-old author strikes the perfect balance between clear, page-flipping storytelling and prose festooned with fresh, richly evocative imagery, exploring the uncomfortable familial experiences and unspoken ties that bind people.
Psychologies - 1 July 2011
[Bed is] very clever. He blends hilarity and tenderness perfectly, and in so doing creates an unconventional story about what it really means to love someone else.
Heat Magazine, Boyd Hilton - 4 June 2011
One of the most original and exciting novels we've read in ages. And we're not just saying that because the writer works for us.
Fabulous Magazine - 5 June 2011
You will be up all night reading it! Read the full article
Radio Litopia - 4 June 2011
BED is published this week and is getting stellar reviews. Read the full article
Shortlist - 2 June 2011
Bed is the life story of the family of Malcolm Ede, an eccentric child who becomes an extraordinary man that, on his 25th birthday, goes to bed without explanation and never gets out again. Over the course of the next 20 years an extravagant metamorphosis takes place and Mal becomes not just the world's fattest man, weighing 100 stone, but a sort of celebrity for doing so. Just like the people in the documentaries. Read the full article
Blokely Online
Whitehouse brings something compelling to morbid obesity and opens up a new dialogue of the contrast between being a victim of these conditions and choosing it as a way to control a situation. It's twisted, but it had us gripped from beginning to end. Read the full article
Pop and Pretty Things - 6 June 2011
Utterly absorbing and completely unforgettable. Read the full article
The Observer Magazine - 22 May 2011
Sad and funny and pretty brilliant, too.
Sabotage Times - 11 May 2011
Humble about his achievements, the former King Edward VI College student should be used to the praise, having already earned himself an award-winning journalistic career, and `Bed' was also crowned the inaugural winner of the 'To Hell with Prizes' award in 2010 for best unpublished novel. While now based in London, the former Alderman Smith School pupil's family still live in the Stockingford area and `Bed' gives several nods to his hometown. Read the full article
Nuneaton News - 11 May 2011
Humble about his achievements, the former King Edward VI College student should be used to the praise, having already earned himself an award-winning journalistic career, and `Bed' was also crowned the inaugural winner of the 'To Hell with Prizes' award in 2010 for best unpublished novel. While now based in London, the former Alderman Smith School pupil's family still live in the Stockingford area and `Bed' gives several nods to his hometown. Read the full article
Publishers Weekly - 5 February 2011
A masterful balance of displaced emotion, black humor, and reportage, this accomplished debut offers an offbeat insight into the lives of a family dealing with morbid obesity. Malcolm "Mal" Ede is the ultimate nonconformist, and, on his 25th birthday, he decides to go to bed and stay there--forever. His increasingly newsworthy protest of the idea of "a mediocre existence" of work, bills, marriage, and kids, and his slide into stasis-induced gross obesity is told from the point of view of his unnamed younger brother, who treats readers to a glimpse of the lives that are touched by the enigmatic Mal. Read the full article
Esquire
Staggering, inventive and heartbreakingly beautiful.
Greg Eden, Waterstones.co.uk
Brilliant... and very expressive. Mal is an extremely vivid firework of a character. Bed has a real dark edge to it as well.
And this is what someone nice wrote about BED:
What makes life worth getting out of bed for? Mal isn't like the other kids. He makes an impression on everyone he meets. So remarkable is his childhood that his family wait for the incredible things he seems born to do. Then one day he goes to bed, never to get out again. Recounted by Mal's younger brother, Bed is a coming-of-age story like no other. It chronicles the metamorphosis of one extraordinary man, and explores what love, loss and family can do to you in a lifetime. Enchanting, funny, surreal and heartwarming, David Whitehouse's novel presents one of the most thrilling and unique voices to emerge from Britain in years.