Review by New York Times Review
IT'S like that old joke: A priest, a minister and a rabbi are discussing the beginning of life. The priest says it begins at conception. The minister says it begins at birth. "And you?" they ask the rabbi. "When do you believe life begins?" He gives a shrug. "When the kids move out and the dog dies." Shep Knacker, the protagonist of Lionel Shriver's latest novel, "So Much for That," believes his life will begin in earnest only when he quits the rat race and moves to Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania whose principal attraction is the low cost of living. Or, as Shep thinks of it, "The third world was running a sale: two lives for the price of one." Never mind that he built his own company and then sold it for a million dollars. Shep persists in feeling like "an indentured servant." He wants his liberty, he tells his wife, trying to sell her on the merits of his plan: "I want to buy myself." Her reply: "But liberty isn't any different from money, is it?" And, sure enough, the questions this novel raises about human existence prove less ontological than economic. Lest one miss the point, more than half the chapters open with a bank statement, underscoring the impression that plot and character development might be tracked via account balance. Laying aside for a moment the paradox of a "freedom" wholly dependent on the exchange rate between the Tanzanian shilling and the United States dollar - laying aside, too, the dubious implications of a white American seeking to shed his "slave" status by purchasing land on the cheap and building a home in Africa - can a novel that regards human experience through its relationship to dollars and cents have literary merit? Can it be entertaining, rousing, illuminating? Well, yes. Look at Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, James, Wharton. Or, more recently, Louis Auchincloss, Tom Wolfe, Jay Mclnerney. All have made hearty fictional stew out of the ways money both predicates and instigates action. But the approach works best when novelists account for the fact that money is hardly ever (to paraphrase Richard Yates) the real reason characters act - when it's treated, rather, as a means to stir up weightier social, psychological and philosophical concerns. Shriver, it would seem, has laid the groundwork to do just that. Neither stingy with subplots nor shy about taking on timely, complex issues, she tosses plenty of both into the pot with real daring and brio. Almost as soon as we meet Shep and learn of his determination at last to embark on "the Afterlife" (as he has christened his long-cherished escape fantasy), he's hit with the news that his wife, Glynis, has a rare cancer, peritoneal mesothelioma, which puts the kibosh on his plans. With oddly triumphant coolness, she informs him that she wishes he wouldn't go: "I'm afraid I will need your health insurance." Co-pays, deductibles, out-of-network providers and lifetime payment caps all become part of Shep's vernacular, first as he navigates his wife's illness and treatment, then as his octogenarian father breaks his leg and must be moved, at Shep's expense, into a nursing home. The idiom of illness seeps into the way he views his plight: As his Pemba nest egg dwindles, Shep thinks of himself as "hemorrhaging" money. He sees Glynis's surgery as "gouging a meaty chunk" from his portfolio, "as if to fiscally mirror the violence inflicted on his wife's abdomen." Conversely, his thoughts on mortality conform to the lingo of finance: as far as he's concerned, the fact that Glynis is dying at age 51 means she is "owed" an "astronomical debt." While visiting his father, a retired minister, in the nursing home, Shep wonders aloud about "a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive." His father parses the matter more finely, asking "what a life is worth, in dollars." If the scene's ensuing dialogue is salted with phrases (expenditure cap, cost-effectiveness, generic ibuprofen) that seem more suited to an editorial on the health care debate than to an intimate exchange between mournful son and ailing paterfamilias, this might reflect Shriver's journalistic status as a regular contributor to The Guardian of London. There's nothing wrong with writing a newsworthy novel, but at times these prodigiously researched and exhaustively argued critiques read more like excerpts from a position paper. HEALTH care also figures crucially in the story of Shep's best friend, Jackson, first because, his 16-year-old daughter has familial dysautonomia, a congenital degenerative condition requiring frequent medical interventions, and later because Jackson undergoes elective plastic surgery on a "certain" part of his lower anatomy (for more than a third of the book Shriver alludes to this matter in equally coy-yet-transparent language). Said operation, horrifically botched, leads to several reconstructive surgeries, themselves not only "exorbitant" but "disappointing." These in turn lead to the ruin of Jackson's marriage, the bankrupting of his family and the ... well, I won't give it away, except to say that a "certain" subplot concludes in a scene worthy of a splatter movie. Jane Austen, anyone? Although this violent swerve into what seemed like a whole different subgenre initially struck me as jarring (so jarring that I wondered whether Shriver's intentions could be comedic), on reflection it seems not entirely unpresaged. The amount of calcified rage contained in these pages is awesome. Shep is a paragon of passive-aggression, at once disgusted by and perversely proud of the way he absorbs abuse without complaint. Glynis, who begins the book "stiff, uncooperative and inflexible," undergoes a lamentable kind of emotional growth after the cancer diagnosis: she develops full-blown schadenfreude. Jackson carries around so much excess anger that his acknowledged pastime is ranting. He can keep it up for pages at a time: about "the immigrants," "arty bohemian types," "Mugs and Mooches," parking tickets, taxes, schools and, of course, health care. Jackson's wife maintains a disturbingly highhanded calm bordering "on insanity." Shep's sister is a caricature of shrewish resentment and cunning. His teenage son is so shut-down he puts Shep in mind of hikikomori, young Japanese who suffer from such acute social withdrawal that they never leave their rooms. And Shep's boss (Shep now works for the company he sold) is an uninflected ogre. Shriver, the author of nine previous novels and the winner of Britain's Orange Prize in 2005 for "We Need to Talk About Kevin," tackles her multifaceted plot with energy and grit. She can and does hold forth smartly on any number of subjects, both topical and esoteric. The book doesn't suffer from vapidity or diffidence or dearth of event. What it lacks is a fullness of wisdom about its characters' potential for growth. If none of the characters are particularly becoming, it may be because none become in any meaningful way over the course of the book. When at last Shep glimpses a solution to his woes, it isn't the result of an expanded capacity to perceive worth. The trick turns out to be precisely "putting a dollar value on human life" - in other words, the fulfillment of his misguided sense of entitlement. Is there a limit, Shriver's central character wonders, to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive? Leah Hager Cohen, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches at the College of the Holy Cross.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In Shriver's latest and exceptionally timely novel, she probes not so delicately into the workings of a marriage, while at the same time exposing the many deficiencies in the American health-care system. Shep Knacker, 48, is finally ready to escape from tax planning and traffic jams to what he for years has called The Afterlife. He and his wife, Glynis, have taken annual research trips to exotic locales like Goa, Laos, and Morocco, Shep diligently compiling notebooks bursting with home prices, crime rates, weather, and for Zach, their teenage son Internet access. As Shep announces to Glynis that the time has come to start enjoying their leisure time while they still can, she calmly reports she's just been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare and extremely virulent cancer. Shep calmly shreds their airplane tickets, and over the next year watches his Merrill Lynch account drop to nothing, The Afterlife nest egg spent on chemo, hospitalizations, and out-of-network specialists. Shriver perceptively dissects every facet of Glynis' illness, from Zach's withdrawal to friends who never visit or call, immersing the reader in how this family deals with terminal disease, and its rippling effects.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A risk taker with a protean imagination, Shriver (The Post-Birthday World) has produced another dazzling, provocative novel, a witty and timely exploration of the failure of our health-care system. Shep Knacker's long-cherished plan to use the million dollars from the sale of his handyman business to retire to a tropical island receives a gut-wrenching blow when his wife, Glynis, is diagnosed with a rare cancer. Transformed into a full-time caregiver, the good-natured Shep is buoyed during the illness of self-centered, vindictive, and obnoxiously demanding Glynis by his working mate and best friend, Jackson Burdina, whose teenage daughter, Flicka, also has a terminal disease. Ironically, Glynis tenaciously clings to life, while Flicka, with whom she bonds, wants to end hers. Jackson, meanwhile, acutely conscious that he's going broke, rails pungently against government regulations and the insurance industry. A mouthpiece for the plight of middle-class workers, Jackson's diatribes about contemporary society-the medical, educational and banking systems, exorbitant taxation, political chicanery-ring painfully true. As Shep's Merrill-Lynch account dwindles and further medical calamities arise, Shriver twists the plot to raise suspense until the heart-lifting denouement. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shep Knacker believes in the "Afterlife" and has spent every moment of his adult life planning for it. But he's not a born-again Christian. Shep's version involves a hammock on a sandy beach in a Third World country where he and his wife, Glynis, can retire and live like royalty for dollars a day. Poised to set his dreams in motion, Shep learns that Glynis has cancer. Now every penny must go to medical expenses not covered by an inadequate health insurance policy. Shriver's (The Post-Birthday World) latest novel is both a realistic portrait of a family dealing with terminal illness and a thorough critique of the American health-care system. Verdict Shriver's strong, clear writing is marred by several complex subplots and lengthy rants by Shep's best friend, Jackson, who is anti almost everything and dealing with a botched surgery himself as well as a daughter with an incurable disorder. Readers who prefer a more focused plot will want to stick with Jodi Picoult, but Shriver's fans and others willing to follow the author's turns will find themselves thinking about the novel long after they've finished it. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/09.]-Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The American health-care system decimates the emotions and finances of one well-meaning citizen in the latest novel by the provocative Shriver (The Post-Birthday World, 2007, etc.). We open with a bank-account figure: $731,778.56, which is how much 50-something Shep Knacker has squirreled away for retirement. That's a decent nest egg for a professional handyman like him, but he wants to make his savings let him live like a prince. To that end, he plans to move his family to Pemba, a tiny island off the coast of Zanzibar where his dollars will go much farther. But his wife, Glynis, is diagnosed with cancer, and the novel's grimly punning title encapsulates what follows: During the course of a year, Shep is forced to abandon his dream as Glynis' aggressive treatments drains his savings. Shriver is captivatingly, unflinchingly expert at exposing how families intuit and sometimes manipulate each other's personality tics, and the novel is at its finest when it shows the parrying between the put-upon Shep and Glynis, who remains a harridan even as her body is ravaged. It's shakier as a polemic against a health-care system that bankrupts families. Shriver embeds the outrage in Shep's friend and co-worker Jackson, who delivers jeremiads on how government and health-care corporations connive against the common man. (The book is mostly set in 2005, before Congress' healthcare reform efforts.) Metaphorically overstating the point that institutional greed affects individual vitality, the book also chronicles Jackson's botched penis-enlargement surgery, and that's just part of the piling-on: It also tracks the miseries of Jackson's ailing teenage daughter and Shep's rapidly declining father. Yet while this sometimes feels like an op-ed writ large, Shriver's skill at characterization is so solid that Jackson never becomes a plot device. And the ingenious, upbeat ending smartly shows just how far the rat race separates us from our better selves. An overly schematic but powerful study of both marriage and medical care. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
