Name: Muscle
ISBN: 9780380717637

Samuel W. Fussell

At age 26, scrawny, Oxford-educated Samuel Fussell entered a YMCA gym in New York to escape the terrors of big city life. Four years and 80 lbs. of firm, bulging muscle later, he was competing for bodybuilding titles in the "Iron Mecca" of Southern California-so weak from intense training and starvation he could barely walk. MUSCLE is the harrowing, often hilarious chronicle of Fussell's divine obsession, his search for identity in a bizarre, eccentric world of "health fascists," "gym bunnies" and "muscleheads"-and his devout, single-minded acceptance of illness, pain, nausea, and steroid-induced rage in his quest for the holy grail of physical perfection.

Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

Muscle

Gavin

Clever portrait of his own descent into madness, or into subculture. The pain and the disgusting force-feeding would be enough, but on top of that there’s the steroids, the constant talcing and oiling, the insane fasting, the niacin overdose to make you flush all over, the injection of inflammatories... He openly depicts his bulking up as a tactic to face the violence and mania of New York, but he is soon swept into growth for growth’s sake. He hates himself, and for four years he takes hyperbolic vengeance on his body.

Weights were more stigmatised in the 80s, so part of this is an apologia, including many moments of giant generosity from his fellow meat-men. But most of it shows the grotesqueness of contorting a body like this, of forcing a life to be about one thing only, any one thing. (Only a very small part of the horror comes from Fussell - a sensitive perceptive Ivy League shoo-in - doing it.) The mental poverty of the lifter credo is yet another stricture.

You should not underestimate the psychological effects of exercise this intense. He becomes a swaggering, brutal loon within months; he stops doing anything at work:


  
at work my muscular behavior became a cause of concern on the floor. It was the general consensus that I had gone too far. Way too far. Some could understand the need to “fill out,” as I put it, and gain a few pounds. But two hour sessions in the morning and two more hours at night, five meals a day, vitamin supplements, and protein shakes?
And if that wasn’t enough, well, there was the noise of my accouterments and the demands of my discipline. I installed an industrial-strength stainless steel blender in my cubicle for my shakes. I monopolized the floor’s sole refrigerator for my meats and milk and eggs, and continuously worked the microwave for a fresh feeding.

My cubicle, which I renamed The Growth Center, became a depot for desiccated beef liver tablets, multivitamin packs, bag after bag of branch-chain amino acids, cartons of Carboplex (a carbohydrate concentrate), and protein powder. What with the magazines and the canon scattered across the floor, the whole place was a muscle minefield, but I didn’t see it that way, not then. Not when I was caught in the full raging force of “the disease.”

... Childhood friends called me in consternation. Apparently, my folly was so spectacular, so profoundly perverse, that even they had gotten wind of it. It was worse, somehow, than enlisting in the Marines or buying finger cymbals and joining the Hare Krishnas.

... “Hasn’t it ever crossed your mind that this whole enterprise is rather vulgar? Is it your parents you want to hurt? Is that it? Is it your friends? Are you waiting for this to appear in the Alumni Notes? Goddamnit, why not do something with your life you can really be proud of?”

... “My physical metamorphosis had brought with it a completely different way of perceiving the world and my place in it... I had needed an attitude adjustment. And I don’t know exactly when the transformation happened—all I can say is that it did. Without being fully aware of it myself, I became the kind of man I had once feared and despised. I became, in fact, a bully...

Then, my manner of speech. It had been too tame before, too timid. No wonder I never got my way in life. I went from answering the phone meekly to shrieking “SPEAK!” into the receiver on the first ring



It’s extremely well written, tasteful and droll and honest, and rammed full of unusual detail. But something is missing.

How much of the spiritual effects were from weights, from pharmaceuticals, or from simply overloading a devotion to something, anything?

I lift, but never like this. I don’t think I do anything so intensely. I, my style and viewpoint, would not survive it.

Lovely review by a scholar-lifter

Muscle Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

Reviews

Highlights