So Much for That - Lionel Shriver

A vastly important read despite its deficiencies.

Without a doubt, Lionel Shriver's power lies in her subject matter. She has a knack for alighting upon social concerns that are current yet, somehow, timeless. In her most famous novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, the issue she tackled was American high school shootings; in Big Brother, it was obesity and the relationship we have to our food. In So Much for That, a book which predates Big Brother but postdates Kevin, she critiques, through a fully formed narrative, the American healthcare system.

The question feeding the novel, as Shep Knacker postpones his plans to escape the daily grind by living abroad in order to care for his ailing wife, is: how much is one life worth? We see just how much Shep is willing to spend of his three-quarters-of-a-million dollar savings - and his lifelong dream - on medical costs.

What is stunning about this novel, though, is not that we see what havoc terminal illness can wreak on individuals and families, but that we also see the wounds it can heal, the way in which it can simplify one's life.

In a series of side-plots, we are put into contact with the resilience, or the reluctance, of families who must care for their loved ones in times of physical decay. Shriver's characters are hyperbolic, and this seems necessary to the way in which she bravely deconstructs human psychology during these struggling times. Often, her prose tends to lend itself equally to anthropology as to literature.

Interestingly, Shep's wife Glynis, thoroughly dislikable throughout the novel, is unchanged by her cancer diagnosis. She remains a rather rude pessimist, hating the intrusions of friends and family who come to 'make themselves feel better', paying their visit so that 'they don't have to feel guilty' if she were to die suddenly. Her attitude is about the only thing in the novel that doesn't change, which offers a welcome contrast to the stoic, born-again sufferer we have come to expect of people/characters with an incurable disease.

Now I slide over, somewhat jarringly, to mention the things I dislike about the novel, and there is one thing in particular - a big hoofing kick in the Shep Knackers - which utterly spoils this as a work of literature, though not (it's important to note) as an immensely important social critique. But we'll get to that.

It has been noted by various critics in the past that Shriver tends often to overload her dialogue with information. In this novel, the problem is worse than ever. Her characters, in a constant state of emotional, existential and physical crisis, are incomparably eloquent. Precise, detailed references to past events; medical information that both (or all) speaking parties are already privy to and so shouldn't need to be said; well-formed complex sentences with all the emphases and climactic build-up of  parliamentary speeches. That is how her characters talk to one another, and it is hard to read and maintain any sense of absorption in the reality of the fiction.

My main beef, however, with So Much for That, is in how it ends. And the more I think about the ending the more I dislike it, for it spoils what up until then was a thoroughly unsentimental journey through a person's terminal illness and through a healthcare system that in any self-respecting modern society should be illegal. Shriver's problem is not that she wades in the shallow end of cheap sentiment with her trousers folded up to her knees, but that she belly flops into the deep end, a triumphant war-cry banging off the tiled walls. From Chapter Eighteen to the end of the book, it seems as if Shriver has begun a victory lap to celebrate reaching the end of her latest novel. Yet the celebration is premature, because it is the very celebration that ruins it. The final eighty pages or so are a summing up, a tying up of all loose ends in an off-putting, sloppy and sickeningly predictable way. It is a process of smoothing over that is completely out of character with the rest of the book.

However, I am not going to spoil any of the plot, as I consider this a vastly important read despite its deficiencies, and wouldn't want to deprive anyone of a book that will stay with them for a very long time. Setting aside the ending, I know that whenever I come into contact with ill health, whether in family, friends or myself, my mind will flash on this novel, and in that way So Much for That will endure.

pp. 531.
Published: Borough Press, 2015 (originally published, 2010).