Publishers Weekly
03/02/2020
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. (May)
From the Publisher
The Motion of the Body Through Space is notionally about fitness fanaticism, but it’s really about physical decline and mortality . . . . What’s remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters’ ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding. — Ariel Levy, The New Yorker
“The prospective thrill of a new novel by the iconoclast Lionel Shriver is located here, in anticipating the skewing of pieties.” — Joshua Ferris, New York Times Book Review
“The fitness industry is a fat target for satire. And Shriver brings all her ferocious wit to bear to mock its hucksters and disciples.” — Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Painfully funny . . . much of it rings true.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space is a caustic satire on the modern obsession with exercise in all its lunatic narcissism, with sideswipes at chiding woke culture. But it also contains the most tender passage I’ve ever read on what it means to grow old in a long marriage. — Janice Turner, The Times (UK)
“Provocative and witty . . . the need for us all to stop moving for a moment and reflect on where we are is Shriver’s main subject.” — Times Literary Supplement (London)
“If you are looking for a new take on how to live well when the body is failing, Shriver could be just the difficult, limping fellow traveller you need.” — The Times (UK)
“A cheeky diatribe on a society determined to go to extremes.” — Booklist
“Scabrously funny. . . . presents a dyspeptic view of people in thrall to exercise. . . . Few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver.” — The Guardian
Joshua Ferris
The prospective thrill of a new novel by the iconoclast Lionel Shriver is located here, in anticipating the skewing of pieties.
Times Literary Supplement (London)
Provocative and witty . . . the need for us all to stop moving for a moment and reflect on where we are is Shriver’s main subject.
Janice Turner
Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space is a caustic satire on the modern obsession with exercise in all its lunatic narcissism, with sideswipes at chiding woke culture. But it also contains the most tender passage I’ve ever read on what it means to grow old in a long marriage.
The Guardian
Scabrously funny. . . . presents a dyspeptic view of people in thrall to exercise. . . . Few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver.”
Booklist
A cheeky diatribe on a society determined to go to extremes.”
The Times (UK)
If you are looking for a new take on how to live well when the body is failing, Shriver could be just the difficult, limping fellow traveller you need.
Ron Charles
The fitness industry is a fat target for satire. And Shriver brings all her ferocious wit to bear to mock its hucksters and disciples.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Painfully funny . . . much of it rings true.
Ariel Levy
The Motion of the Body Through Space is notionally about fitness fanaticism, but it’s really about physical decline and mortality . . . . What’s remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters’ ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding.
Booklist
A cheeky diatribe on a society determined to go to extremes.”
Library Journal
★ 04/01/2020
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.
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-09
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.
