The Motion of the Body through Space by Lionel Shriver
About the author
Lionel Shriver is an award-winning American author and journalist. Born Margaret Ann, Shriver changed her name to Lionel at the age of 15, to reflect her tomboyish personality. She studied at Barnard College, Columbia University, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Shriver has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast and currently resides in London. Her journalistic work includes contributions to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Economist, the Guardian and the Spectator.
Shriver’s first novel, The Female of the Species, was published in 1987. It was followed by another six novels before her rise to the fame with We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), which won the Orange Prize in 2005. It was adapted as a film in 2011, starring Tilda Swinton.
Review
Alfred Hickling
Friday 8 May, 2020
The Guardian
Lionel Shriver’s scabrously funny 15th novel presents a dyspeptic view of people in thrall to exercise. In 2013 Shriver’s own daily regime involved “130 press-ups, 200 side crunches, 500 sit-ups and 3,000 star jumps…The jumps take 32½ minutes, or three every two seconds”. The Motion of the Body Through Space was written, she recently revealed, after she realised that she may be more dedicated to her exercise than to her writing.
The protagonist, Serenata Terpsichore (“rhymes with chicory”), is a 60-year-old woman from upstate New York with a beguiling voice and ruined knees. The former she puts to lucrative use as a voiceover artist and narrator of audiobooks. The latter are the result of a lifetime’s adherence to the doctrine of working out; in particular the belief that 10-mile runs are the key to longevity and good health.
As it tuns out, all those years of pounding the sidewalk mean that Serenata’s old age is accompanied by searing joint pain and the need for a knee-replacement operation. To make matters worse, her husband Remington has caught the fitness bug. Forced into early retirement from the New York State Department of Transport, the formerly sedentary and unathletic Remington announces that he intends to fill the days by training to run a marathon. A nubile young personal trainer named Bambi convinces him that merely running 26.2 miles is passé; these days triathlons are where it’s at.
Under the rather-too-intensive guidance of Bambi, Remington enrols for a MettleMan race (like Ironman, with the punitive addition of a single chin-up to cap off the 140.62 combined miles of swimming, cycling and running). Not surprisingly, this opens a huge rift in the couple’s marriage. Serenata views exercise as “biological housework, like vacuuming the rug”, and is appalled by her husband’s sanctimonious exaltation of fitness. “MettleMan isn’t just an exercise regime,” she complains. “It’s a cult. The man I fell in love with has been kidnapped.”
It’s interesting that given her own obsessive exercise regimen, Shriver is prepared to admit to being part of the problem. The novel even goes so far as to posit a contemporary definition of what the word “problematic” has come to mean: “It’s, like, a great big giant word for everything that’s super bad.”
The Motion of the Body Through Space is proof, if it were needed, that Shriver’s natural response to an open wound is to pour on more salt.
Shriver’s essential bugbear is that, taken to extremes, the concept of cultural appropriation prohibits the act of fiction writing itself: “If writers have to restrict their imagination to personal experience,” she has stated, “the only option left is memoir.” The grand irony of course is that The Motion of the Body Through Space is a novel drawn from the first-hand experience of a writer who monitors her frequency of star jumps and has been on the receiving end of a pasting for her views on diversity. Certainly it’s problematic - but few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver.