The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

June 6, 2020

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Serenata Terpsichore and Remington Alabaster have been married for over 30 years.  They have raised two children, weathered the storm of Remington's forced early retirement, and generally had an extremely happy life together.  They enjoy each other's company more than they do anyone else's (including their children).  For her entire adult life, Serenata exercised for 90 minutes daily, running and cycling and doing calisthenics, not out of any fanaticism, it was just part of who she was.  Things changed for Serenata when she turned 60 and discovered that years of daily exercise had damaged her knees to the point of needing knee replacements in both knees unless she wanted to live with constant pain.  Around the time she resigns herself to giving up running, her husband Remington decides that he wants to run a marathon, something even exercise devotee Serenata had never done.  As he trains for his big run with a new group of friends, Serenata wonders how much of her husband's decision was aimed at her, now that she was unable to pursue her favorite hobby, out of resentment for all the time she spent exercising over the years.

The main plot line satirizes the cult of exercise, also highlighting the downside of exercise:  when you pound on your joints continually, they are going to wear out sooner.  Another theme is aging:  no matter how hard you try, your body is going to age, we are all eventually going to die, and years of rigid dieting and strenuous exercise may not buy you any extra time.  There are interesting parallels between Remington and his newfound fanaticism about exercise, and their adult daughter Valeria who has been sucked into a fundamentalist religious group - both groups have cult-type overtones.  The story also gives a look at the big-business aspects of marathons and triathalons.  I have read several other books by Lionel Shriver, and this one lands somewhere in the middle, not nearly as good as We Need to Talk About Kevin but nowhere near as bad as Big Brother.  

It took me about 25% of the book to get into the story; after that point, I was interested enough in the dynamics between the characters to continue and finish the book. During her last illness, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis remarked that she regretted all the time she wasted doing sit-ups, a realization that the main characters in novel arrive at in the final section.  While I was overall satisfied with how the story ended, I found Serenata's happy musings on death in the final section to be rather depressing.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.