`EAT FAT' A THREE-COURSE FEAST OF CULTURAL SPOOF.

Byline: Richard Bernstein The New York Times

Title: ``Eat Fat''

Author: Richard Klein

Data: Illustrated. 247 pages, Pantheon; $24

Our rating: Three Stars

Richard Klein, who ascended to the Contrarians' Hall of Fame with his book ``Cigarettes Are Sublime'' a couple of years ago, has done it again. Last time he wrote of the pleasures and the cultural importance of smoking. This time the subject is fat.

In both instances, Klein finds the combination of American utopianism, moralism and consumer culture to be well nigh unbearable. And so, taking leave of his usual occupation as a professor of French at Cornell University, Klein rants entertainingly and wittily against the conventional wisdom and the narrow arbitrariness of taste.

The consistent philosophy expressed in ``Cigarettes Are Sublime'' and now in ``Eat Fat'' is that the evil trio - utopianism, moralism and the consumer culture - are making it emotionally painful for people simply to be themselves.

This is especially the case with ``Eat Fat,'' which the admittedly corpulent Klein proclaims in his spoofy way to be a ``postmodern diet book.'' The ``postmodern'' part of the description is not very important, even though Klein uses the phrase several times. (In general, if truth be known, he rarely contents himself with saying something only once in ``Eat Fat,'' which is gluttonous in its repetition of its best notions.)

In fact, Klein's book is an anti-diet book in two senses. First, he wants to establish a different attitude toward physical beauty and the consumption of food, one harking back to a time before the current mania for thinness took hold, to the not-so-distant era when to be fat was to be beautiful, sensuous, succulent, rich and happy.

Second, Klein wants us to face up to facts: Even as the population of the United States (and other countries) diets more, spending tens of billions of dollars on weight-loss therapies and medications, it gets fatter all the time. For most people, to become thin is to strive for an impossible ideal. It is to try to be somebody one is not.

And yet the pressure of what Klein calls the beauty-health-diet industry is so intense that it causes not just material denial but also denial of the soul. The proper response to this, Klein writes, is a soul-affirming, taboo-breaking, frequently repeated injunction: ``Eat fat.''

``It's easy, in our society, to love thin, but hard to achieve it,'' Klein writes. ``It's easy to be fat today, but hard to love it. Rather than working to get thin we should all be working to love fat. Not in order to become more obese, although that may happen, but because fat is what most of us are becoming anyway.''

That is a reckless proposition, or, perhaps more accurately, it is an ethically dubious statement if taken absolutely seriously. At the very end of ``Eat Fat,'' Klein finds that he has to deconstruct his book's conclusions. His mother, whom he affectionately portrays as a victim of the diet paradox, gets so fat that she has desperate trouble breathing.

Suddenly the gleeful, transgressive, devil-may-care admonition to ``eat fat'' seems downright life-threatening, and Klein is forced to admit that a degree of self-restraint, even self-denial, might not be such a bad idea after all.

In other words, in attacking the tyranny of the thinness cult and longing for a renewed cult of size, Klein goes too far. Then again, he is not so much trying to advocate either a public or a private policy on weight control as he is subjecting some of our most automatic contemporary reflexes to a searching scrutiny.

The pleasure in reading this intelligent and lively book comes from the author's contrarian originality, his bon vivant's outrage, his iconoclastic logic as he ranges over the various aspects of his subject: the changing attitudes toward thinness and fatness, the role of fat in literature and art, the heavenly pleasure afforded by goose stuffed with armagnac-soaked foie gras.

Klein discusses with lubricious eloquence the well-rounded nudes of Renoir and Rubens; he exposes the perverse effects of all those low-fat, no-fat, fat-free foods in the supermarket; he is brutal on the diabolical unintended consequences of dieting.

In the part of the book that comes closest to a discussion of public policy, Klein subjects the debates over obesity within the medical profession to a scathing, well-researched review.

``My position is this,'' Klein says on the last of these subjects. ``Even if fat is unhealthy, which it is and it isn't, for the vast majority of people, it's probably healthier than the alternative. The alternative is dieting, compulsive exercise, hypervegetarianism, diet pills. My opinions start from the a priori premise that administering any powerful drugs to a large population over a long period of time is not good for public health.''

Klein acknowledges his debt here to Naomi Wolf, whose book ``The Beauty Myth'' was a more political presentation of one of Klein's chief arguments: that today's preference for anorexic thinness is not just contrary to our biological nature but is due to a kind of capitalist collusion among the medical profession, the diet and food industries and the media.

Among his more calculatedly outrageous passages is a portrait of fat erotica. He has a radical purpose on that subject. He does not want mere tolerance of fatness, though that would already be a step in the right direction. He wants fatness to be loved, admired, deemed sexy and delicious.

There are weaknesses as well as inconsistencies in the argument. Klein never seems sure whether fatness is the normal human state or whether it is pathological. He cites statistics showing that the United States is the fattest major country on the globe and has been getting fatter at a rapid rate for two decades.

Common sense (and the experience of Klein's mother) would lead one to view that development with a bit more concern than the author of ``Eat Fat'' summons up. There is much evidence that to EAT FAT, as Klein always puts it, in capital letters, is bad for you.

Still, reading Klein's book will be beneficial, enjoyable, even liberating in its way, especially if you do it in lieu of another chocolate truffle, a second portion of well-marbled steak or a couple more scoops of Cappuccino Commotion, the low-fat kind.