The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on May 19, 2020

Lionel Shriver is known for picking a social trend and exploring its ramifications by building a novel around it. In The Motion of the Body Through Space, the trend is exercise, or as one character calls it, “the fetishization of fitness.” While it lasts, fitness can be a great thing, although like so many great things, it can also lead to smugness and a sense of moral superiority — I’m fit and you’re fat. The novel might be read as an indictment of self-righteous people who judge or condemn those who criticize their behavior. People who question slavish devotion to exercise, for example, are ridiculed as envious slugs, while those who criticize laziness are scorned as fitness freaks. But the novel explores more than the lifestyle of extreme exercise. Its ultimate subject is aging and the inevitable decay that no amount of fitness training can defeat.

As Shriver makes clear, we enjoy the illusion that we are in control of our bodies, but “only at the body’s behest” do we exist at all. Some people hate their bodies, an antagonism that grows “into the central battle of their lives.” Others are happy with their bodies until they fail, which they ultimately will. All it takes is “a moment of clumsiness on the stairs or a bad oyster” to come undone. If nothing else, age will rob the body of its vitality. One point of Shriver’s novel is that nothing lasts, that healthy bodies will inevitably be overtaken by decay and disease. All that smugness might one day be — like so many other things — a source of regret.

Unlike her husband, Serenata Terpsichore has always exercised regularly — to the point where, at 60, she is contemplating a knee replacement. Serenata is an insular, self-contained person. She has always resented it when something she enjoys doing becomes trendy. If she discovers a band or a kind of footwear, she hates knowing that “whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasm or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity.”

Serenata is married to Remington Alabaster, probably because he is the only other human whose company she finds tolerable. Remington thinks Serenata wants “to hog all the benefits” of her habits and can’t abide anyone else enjoying them. To Remington, Serenata’s “lack of communal ties is a little chilling,” but Serenata has “no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”

Serenata and Remington have a daughter named Valeria who largely ignored them before deciding that she forgave them for unspecified wrongdoing. Now Valeria wants to save their souls with born-again fanaticism. Their son Deacon, on the other hand, was apparently born evil and has no desire to change. Deacon plays a relatively small role but he’s the only likable character in the novel. Remington bemoans the fact that their kids grew up to be white trash. Serenata and Remington can at least bond over their failure as parents.

The first third of the novel addresses Remington’s training and participation in a marathon, which Serenata not-so-secretly views with derision. During the marathon, Remington meets and later hires a sexy fitness trainer who uses the professional name Bambi Buffer. Bambi encourages Remington to complete the marathon and then to move on to the latest trend, triathlons. Training is important, Remington decides, because “Life comes down to nothing more than the motion of the body through space.” “Traversing distances,” in his view, is “all there is to do.”

Most of the characters suspect Serenata of undermining Remington out of envy. With a gimpy knee, she can no longer compete with runners, and she doesn’t look as hot on her bicycle as the gear-clad babes. Serenata, on the other hand, justly worries that something catastrophic will happen to Remington, given that he is in no condition (and never will be) to compete in a triathlon. I give Shriver credit for being fair to both perspectives. Serenata might not understand why Remington feels a need to prove himself, and Remington might not understand why Serenata is so unsupportive, but the reader will understand them both.

At some point, the story detours to provide a surprisingly contrived explanation of how Remington lost his government job to political correctness. Her reliance on superficial caricatures rather than her customary deep probe of an issue is disappointing. Some of the points made by Remington and Serenata are sound — of course we shouldn’t automatically believe accusations of workplace abuse or harassment simply because they are made, and employers often rely on pretexts to fire aging employees before they qualify for a full pension — but the allegations of work rule violations that gave Remington a new life of leisure, and the questioning he endures (apparently with no civil service protections whatsoever), are so unrealistic that they damage the novel’s credibility. Fortunately, the detour is relatively brief.

Shriver took the risk of writing about two disagreeable characters. Readers who need to like characters to like a book might be turned off by Serenata and her husband. As Remington eventually tells Serenata, she is so separate from others, so disdainful of the need for company and contemptuous of their support, that she seems a creature of self-satisfied intellect, devoid of empathy. She has excluded everyone but Remington, including her children, from her bubble. Remington, on the other hand, is just plain stubborn, which might explain why their marriage has survived. He is also too easily taken in by the hot trainer, although that's a common enough failing of aging men.

So The Motion of the Body Through Space is about fitness and trends and families and the conflict between self and being part of something larger. Readers might draw their own lessons from those themes, but the humility that accompanies aging is the novel’s final lesson. “But this brand of humility wasn’t the sort you graciously embraced. It was foisted on you. You grew humble because you had been humbled.” At the same time, the epiphany that the great benefit of growing old is letting go (i.e., no longer caring about the world’s problems because you know you will die before the apocalypse) is one I hope I never have.

The penultimate chapter reads like a suspense novel as the reader wonders how Remington will fare in his greatest challenge. It is the best part of the novel. The rest of the ride is uneven, like the gravel road on which Remington wipes out while biking. Still, the story is always engaging. I am a fan of Shriver’s work and I enjoyed nearly all of this novel despite hitting a couple of potholes along the path to the novel's conclusion.

RECOMMENDED

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on June 4, 2013 

"More concept than substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or political zealotry." But as Pandora Halfdanarson learns, weight loss is a shabby religion: "you could only continue to worship at the altar of comestible restraint if you chronically failed your vows." Pandora has gained more than twenty pounds in the last three years, but she doesn't stand out in a generation of people who are battling (or surrendering to) obesity, who are marked as members of an underclass because of their weight. Many participate in "the national sport" of dieting, but few succeed. Pandora's obsession with her weight and that of her brother -- and, by extension, our national obsession with our own appearance and that of others -- is at the heart of Big Brother.

Quietly subversive, studiously non-opinionated, confidently dull, and intensely self-critical, Pandora is the epitome of a Lionel Shriver protagonist. The daughter of a former television star who has faded from the national memory, Pandora is a married loner, comfortably living within her own mind. Not wanting to be "a hyperlink to someone else's Wikipedia page," she shuns the derivative fame that her father's stage name brings. She would prefer anonymity to the celebrity she attained when her successful business, Baby Monotonous, landed her on magazine covers.

Pandora's brother, Edison, does not share her insular nature. He can talk all day, "at the end of which no one knew him any better than before," and he has adopted their father's stage name as his own. Edison's career as a jazz pianist isn't going well. Needing a place to live, he travels to Iowa to stay with Pandora. Seeing Edison for the first time in several years, Pandora is shocked to discover that he is huge, a very big brother indeed. At first, Pandora doesn't know how to broach the subject tactfully and so ignores it, but: "The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit."

To the extent that Big Brother is (as Shriver's novels so often are) an exploration of a social problem by illustrating its impact on a single family, Pandora's attempt to understand and explain Edison's obesity can be taken as Shriver's effort to understand why so many people gobble down Cinnabons and Big Macs, knowing they are putting their health at risk. Does Edison overeat because he's depressed or is he depressed because he's fat? Perhaps he binges to showcase his sense of failure on a grand scale. While Pandora's puzzlement about her brother approaches judgment -- something that is contrary to her nature and that leads her to question the stereotypes associated with size -- she also wonders why obesity's status as a social issue should make Edison's diet and lethargy anyone's business but Edison's. Or is eating oneself to death the business of everyone who cares about the eater?

Just as Shriver frequently draws literary themes from social issues, she is a tireless explorer of marital and family issues. Pandora has an inflexible husband, a rebellious teenage stepson, and a needy brother. She wonders how much support a sibling can expect when the sibling's demands are a source of marital stress. Fletcher Feuerbach, Pandora's husband, represents Edison's opposite extreme: he bicycles fifty miles a day and refuses to eat anything made from white flour. Edison's oversized presence drives a wedge between Pandora and Fletcher. Fletcher wants to escape Edison's "miasma of sloth," but Fletcher's rigid diet is just as maddening as Edison's unwillingness to diet. When Pandora accuses Fletcher of being on "a moral crusade" against fat, she exposes his true motivation for complaining about Edison: the complaints stoke his own sense of superiority.

To avoid spoilers, I won't discuss the meat of the story. Suffice it to say that diets have their downsides and that the honest portrayal of family drama is Shriver's greatest skill. The wry humor that often seeds Shriver's work is abundant here, but she remains one of the most serious, insightful, and penetrating chroniclers of the human condition to be found in current American literature. She writes with sensitivity and compassion, from a variety of perspectives, without ever becoming preachy. An ending that recasts the story in a different light initially disappointed me, but after I thought about it, I came to understand and appreciate it. This isn't Shriver's best work, but it's awfully good.

RECOMMENDED

A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver

First published in 1996

When so many modern novels are about dysfunctional families, why read another one? There are several reasons. Lionel Shriver brings a unique wit to her storytelling. Her tale is fresh and funny. She gives her characters depth but isn't oppressive about it.

The "perfectly good family" in question consists of Corlis, Truman, and Mordecai McCrea, three siblings who must come together to deal with their inheritance after their mother's death. The will leaves each child a quarter of the estate (consisting mostly of the family home) with the remaining quarter going to the ACLU. Truman (the youngest, who has always lived with his parents, even after his marriage) feels entitled to keep the house for himself. Mordecai (the oldest, pushing 40, with three broken marriages and a drinking problem) wants to sell the place and use his share of the money to revive his cash-poor business. Corlis (who was invited to leave her flat in London after her two male roommates discovered that she was splitting her affections between them) has decided to stay in North Carolina but finds herself in the middle of the dispute between the brothers, neither of whom can buy out the other's interest without her help.

A Perfectly Good Family was first published in Great Britain in 1996. Shriver's sixth novel mixes comedy with drama, but there isn't much dramatic tension in the conflict between the children. The drama increases toward the end, as the deadline for selling or refinancing draws near (the ACLU wants its money and isn't inclined to wait any longer), but the mood remains lighthearted. The reader has little reason to invest in either brother; in their separate ways, they are equally childish. Corlis, who provides the novel's point of view (and who seems to be something of a stand-in for Lionel Shriver, who grew up with two brothers in Raleigh, where the novel is set), is a more sympathetic character, although so often adrift and indecisive that it is difficult to cheer for her success. The novel ends on an up note that quickly follows a tragedy, but none of that created an emotional impact that would lead me to recommend the novel as a satisfying family drama.

As light comedy, however, the novel succeeds. The characters are amusing and in broad terms are recognizable as members of typical American families. Shriver's pithy observations about their roles in the family and in life make the novel worthwhile. For instance, Truman looks forward to finishing a product (shampoo or whatever) so he can buy a new one, leading Corlis to wonder "if this delight in dispatching products in order to re-acquire them wasn't a functional definition of the middle class." It's that kind of gleefully irreverent writing that gives the novel its edge, and thus its value. A Perfectly Good Family didn't generate any belly laughs while I was reading it, but it produced enough knowing nods and soft chuckles to make me recommend it as a better-than-average comedic exploration of a family dynamic.

RECOMMENDED

Game Control by Lionel Shriver

First published in 1994

Living in "a state of near-permanent shame" and ever fearful of being a burden, Eleanor Merritt tries to please everyone, which of course pleases no one. Wracked with guilt at the poverty she sees in Kenya, Eleanor is a soft touch for anyone who wants to take advantage of her -- and nearly everyone does. Eleanor lives in Nairobi, representing an organization that seeks to empower women through birth control -- an ironic choice given that Eleanor feels no empowerment of her own. At a population control conference she encounters Calvin Piper, with whom she once had a fling. Piper, the former director of the USAID's Population Division, now advocates rather extreme methods of controlling population growth (he sees high levels of infant mortality as a good thing). Eleanor also meets Wallace Threadgill, a former advocate of population control who now argues that population expansion is economically beneficial for underdeveloped countries. To Eleanor's dismay, both men are celibate. Eleanor starts spending most of her free time with Calvin and, despite their celibacy, they fight as lovers do (she cares only about feelings, he cares only about facts). When Eleanor learns the nature of Calvin's plan to control the world's population, she can't decide whether to call the police or join the cause.

Although you wouldn't know it from that synopsis, Game Control is a very funny book. Shriver's characters are memorable. Eleanor, 38, childless, and undergoing a midlife crisis that seems to have started in her childhood, could be a cliché, but Shriver makes her fresh. Habitually striving to be kind, Eleanor nonetheless has a biting sense of humor, as when she observes: "I'm quite tired of listening to men describe how they've turned into emotional fence posts as if it's some kind of achievement."

Shriver has great fun with the influence of funding on statistics: her epidemiologists want rates of HIV infection in Africa to be high while her demographers want those rates to be too low to affect population growth; each group produces statistics that will support their fundraising. In materials appended to the 2007 P.S. edition of the novel (the novel was first published in 1994), Shriver explains that she was motivated to write the book by her discovery of the relationship between research and funding.

My biggest issue with Game Control is that the novel doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The tone is too lighthearted for the book to succeed as drama; Calvin's rather extreme plan to control population growth can't be taken seriously, leaving Eleanor's desire to get laid as the only source of dramatic tension. The novel doesn't fully succeed as a comedy; despite some very funny moments, Shriver's attempt to grapple with serious issues in a serious way undercuts the story's comedic appeal. The novel works best as social commentary but ultimately I was left asking wondering what its thesis was, what point Shriver was trying to make. If her point is that people don't solve problems by attending endless conferences, fair enough, but that leaves us wondering whether people should be doing something else, perhaps something less drastic than Calvin had in mind, but Shriver offers no effective alternatives to the methods that she vilifies. Finally, although the ending is satisfying, Eleanor's lack of personal growth is not. At times it seems she's making progress in her quest to become something other than a doormat, but by the end little about her has changed. That's disappointing given that she is such a likable character. Of course, the novel might simply reflect a disagreeable reality: it is difficult to change one's personality in middle age. That fact makes it no less frustrating to read about a character who doesn't internalize the lessons she seems to be learning.

Despite those reservations, I recommend the novel. It isn't perfect but it's worth reading just for the chance to chuckle while getting to know the characters.

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