Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Crutcher, Chris. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. New York City: Greenwillow Books, 1993.

Chubby Eric Calhoune has always felt like he was on the outside. He finds a kindred spirit in Sarah Byrnes (who prefers her whole name), who was scarred in a mysterious accident when she was very young. Feeling like outcasts, the two begin to write an underground newspaper Crispy Pork Rinds as a way to get their feelings out. Friends since middle school, Eric (often called Mobe) and Sarah find themselves at a crossroads during their senior year. After being recruited to the swim team, the formerly rotund Eric has started to slim down, begins building a relationship with a girl and finds tension growing between he and Sarah. Suddenly, during a class one day Sarah quits talking, going catatonic. Her doctors encourage Eric to talk to her, maybe to jog her out of her comatose state, which Eric does with loyalty. Eventually, Eric finds out that Sarah is faking her silence because she is terrified of her father, who was the one that scarred her. After an altercation with her psychotic father in which Eric is injured, Mr. Byrnes is captured and Sarah is finally safe with a new family.

Crutcher writes this work around a theme that is typical of this genre; Sarah Byrnes is having a crisis and her friend is trying to solve it. Most striking about the work is that though it sounds formulaic, the way Crutcher presents the characters and plots the story creates a world inside of a world. Using vivid imagery, the author brings us inside the school, swim practice and Sarah’s hospital room without missing a beat. Descriptive sentences like, “my frozen hair hugging my head like a bicycle helmet and my breath shooting from my mouth like exhaust from a truck,” bring the reader into the story and its atmosphere. The quick language and comical situations round out the oft-heavy story line, breaking up some of the truly grave and profound obstacles the characters face. Contributing to the fullness of the story is the addition of positive adults, like Eric’s swim coach and his mother’s boyfriend. These adults intervene when necessary, are encouraging, involved and are a stark contrast to the villainous Mr. Byrnes. Such a juxtaposition of characters and actions make the lesson within the novel less preachy and more substantial.

Eric and Sarah are categorized within their high school, but are revealed to be more than the characterization given to them by their peers. The same consideration of being more than what is seen is not given to every character in the story, however. In a controversial class which the main and secondary characters share, many of the Christians in the class are portrayed as ultra-conservative, duplicitous and humorless. Kirkus Reviews also point out this bias by saying Crutcher “doesn’t always play fair in developing his themes – all the conservative Christians are dupes or hypocrites.” Should Crutcher have developed some opposites to these one-sided Christians, like he has with the adults in the story, it would seem less like he was attempting to make a point in his writing. In a work where not everything is as it seems, having typical, flat antagonists does not match with the rest of the story.

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