So Much for That by Lionel Shriver: review

By Lucy Daniel 200PM GMT fifteen March 2010

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shrivers steadfast new novel seethes with injustices. Like her prior books, it hits haughty subjects head-on and revels in observant the unsayable. This time the the US healthcare system.

After a lifetime of tough work Shepherd Knacker has sole his hired man for odd jobs commercial operation and is evading his pursuit and an bum matrimony to retire to an island in the sun. His plans are stalled when he discovers his wife, Glynis, has cancer. Shes going to need his healing insurance. Even with word he shortly realises ruin have to feet large chunks of the bills himself.

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The novels alternative theme is conventionalist American family life. Shriver writes about irritated and mostly dislikable people. That doesn"t meant her novels are unpleasant, but she creates her readers work to find the proposal spots among the toughness.

Glyniss health starts to slip and her friends blur away. Shep finds himself wondering "if people have regularly been so weak. Disloyal. Spineless." Meanwhile his churlish mother ("All the niceness, it creates me even sicker") rues the actuality that her disease is not foul and hopes Hurricane Katrina will wreak the set-back on everybody else. Sheps most appropriate friend, Jackson, himself struggling with his daughters singular genetic disease, cynically rants about what great it does to compensate your taxes and economise on your weekly shop.

His tragicomic repertoire of grudges usually produces unconstrained humorous titles for his never-to-be-written book "Just Because Youre a Quailing, Lily-Livered Twit Who Folks Smarter and Gutsier than You Are Bleeding White Doesnt Mean Youre Not Still a Nice Person"; "The Myth of the Law-Abiding Citizen"; "How We Gullible Goodie-Goodies Are Brain-washed in to S--- Eating Compliance (or) You Have No Idea How Much You Could Get Away With if You Only Had Balls".

There are big American themes of work and leisure at fool around here. Benjamin Franklins Advice to a Young Tradesman "remember that time is money" tolls bleakly by the novels pages similar to a souvenir mori. Chapters proceed with bald statements from Sheps shrinking assets account, and the books big theme "what a hold up is worth, in dollars" starts to be answered. The usually transformation is decline.

This is a wily theme to proceed but sentimentality, but Shriver pulls it off. Eventually Jacksons raging unfitness leads him to a gruesomely mystic movement opposite his own unwell body. It creates ill celebration of the mass but has a cathartic outcome on the plot. Passive annoy is transposed with action. And Shriver creates a startlingly relocating denouement.

An ambivalence about motherhood should be no warn from the lady who brought us We Need to Talk About Kevin, and depot seizure and harsh set-back are not a happiness to review about, though a novel about American healthcare is ideally pitched for book organisation discussions and timely media debate. There are lots of distributed articulate points euthanasia, superbugs, caring homes written to whip up annoy in the reader about the couple in between being well and being well-off. As polemic the absolute and persuasive.

The some-more insinuate inquiries are some-more appealing sex in the shade of death; the singular space of doctors to show kindness; how most of a kicking can an particular take from the system; is there some-more than "the body"; and how does one die well?

The story contains, notwithstanding everything, far some-more humour than you competence expect, and the formidable trail Shep and Glynis step by recrimination to settlement is quite moving. Finally, could that be a happy ending? A devious annulment of the work ethic gives the characters a conceptual clarity of relocating on. Its a consternation that theme make a difference on the aspect so dour can be remade in to something so uplifting.

So Much for That

by Lionel Shriver

436PP, HarperCollins, �15

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