The Motion of the Body Through Space

March 2, 2020
Shriver’s bitter satire of the elite exercise industry (after the collection Property) huffs along with sobering reflections on aging. Serenata Terpsichore and Remington Alabaster, married for 32 years, have recently moved to Hudson, N.Y., in the wake of Remington losing his civil engineering job in Albany. The couple’s bumptious domestic bickering comes to a head after sedentary Remington, at 64, announces he will run marathon. Serenata, who’s been a runner for years, scolds him for the unwelcome “incursion into her territory.” Nevertheless, Remington trains, buys neon-colored running gear and a “brushed-steel, state-of-the-art” treadmill with surround sound. At the finish line, he is accompanied by Bambi Buffer, a late 30-something woman in a lavender sports bra whom Serenata derisively refers to as an “anatomy illustration.” Bambi encourages Remington toward a new goal, the Lake Placid MettleMan Triathlon. With Serenata as a mouthpiece, Shriver casts her familiar brand of mordant humor at easy targets, but unlike in the work of Edward St. Aubyn, for instance, the narrator’s meanness serves no apparent purpose, and the razor-sharp observation isn’t balanced by self-implication. The result is underwhelming.

Starred review from April 1, 2020

After losing his job in the Department of Transportation, where he had been a long-valued employee, 63-year-old Remington Alabaster finds himself in need of a new purpose. When he informs his wife, Serenata, that he intends to run a marathon some months hence, she is immediately dismissive. Until now, Serenata has been the runner and fitness fanatic in the family. But arthritic knees have forced her to abandon running and severely restrict her exercise routine. Despite her opposition, Remington takes to his training regime with the zeal of a religious convert, while Serenata clings to the hope that his obsession will end once the marathon is over. That hope is crushed when Remington hobbles over the finish line and announces his new goal to compete in the MettleMan, an ultra-triathlon that pushes endurance beyond normal limits and tests his aging body and their marriage. VERDICT As she has done before in novels such as We Need To Talk About Kevin, Shriver takes on hot-button topics--in this case the fitness craze, toxic workplaces, the tyranny of political correctness, and the indignities of aging--and wraps them up in a story filled with sly humor and insight. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020
A sexagenarian starts working out. Is it self-care...or something more sinister? What on earth is happening to Lionel Shriver? In novels like The Post-Birthday World (2007), she stood out as a savvy, cleareyed observer of human foibles. Of late, though, her fiction has become increasingly hectoring, determined to call out what she sees as PC groupthink and browbeat her own characters for their gumption deficits. Here, her bugbear is people who cultishly abuse their bodies in the name of good health. The drama centers on Remington, who's decided to run a marathon at 64 after leaving his job at New York's state transportation agency. His wife, Serenata, ought to be immediately supportive, being a fitness junkie herself. But she prides herself on being a freethinker (she invented her own workouts! She invented the hair scrunchie all by herself!) and sees marathons as a fad. Remy, she thinks, has "caught a contagion, like herpes." To her relief, Remy barely wheezes across the marathon's finish line, but en route finds a booster in a trainer named Bambi Buffer, who spews uplift while pressing Remy to train for a triathlon. Serenata sees cow-eyed conformists wherever she looks: in Bambi, in Remy's fellow triathletes, in her own insufferable born-again daughter. But Shriver's juiciest target is the woman who cost Remington his job, a simplistically rendered social justice warrior bogeyman: an unqualified 27-year-old Nigerian woman with a gender-studies degree who becomes Remington's boss and then deliberately works to undermine him as an older white man. Alas, no triathlon can conquer the injustice of it all. There's a note of intentional satire here: Remington's goals and Serenata's judgments are both inflated for effect. But in the process, Shriver has made a cartoon of her talents as a social observer. Shriver has written some fine novels. Run away from this one.

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April 1, 2020
After a lengthy and satisfying career, Remington loses his job following an emotionally fraught dust-up with his boss. He channels his frustration into running a marathon at the ripe, not-quite-decrepit age of 64, surprising his wife of 33 years with his sudden athleticism, a realm that used to be Serenata's purview until her 61-year-old knees cried uncle. Watching her heretofore cerebral, sedentary husband transform himself into a lean, mean running machine is disconcerting, especially when Remington's motivation arrives in the form of Bambi Buffer, his dynamic and exceedingly attractive personal trainer. While there is nothing nuanced in Shriver's (Property, 2018) scathing excoriation of contemporary cultural clich�s, from fitness fanaticism to workplace political correctness to religious zealotry, there is something surprisingly tender in Serenata's vulnerability about the state of her marriage and her looming physical limitations. With verve, vehemence, and moral vigilance, Shriver's archetypical characters thrum with self-righteous recrimination in this cheeky diatribe on a society determined to go to extremes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)