The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on May 19, 2020

Lionel Shriver is known for picking a social trend and exploring its ramifications by building a novel around it. In The Motion of the Body Through Space, the trend is exercise, or as one character calls it, “the fetishization of fitness.” While it lasts, fitness can be a great thing, although like so many great things, it can also lead to smugness and a sense of moral superiority — I’m fit and you’re fat. The novel might be read as an indictment of self-righteous people who judge or condemn those who criticize their behavior. People who question slavish devotion to exercise, for example, are ridiculed as envious slugs, while those who criticize laziness are scorned as fitness freaks. But the novel explores more than the lifestyle of extreme exercise. Its ultimate subject is aging and the inevitable decay that no amount of fitness training can defeat.

As Shriver makes clear, we enjoy the illusion that we are in control of our bodies, but “only at the body’s behest” do we exist at all. Some people hate their bodies, an antagonism that grows “into the central battle of their lives.” Others are happy with their bodies until they fail, which they ultimately will. All it takes is “a moment of clumsiness on the stairs or a bad oyster” to come undone. If nothing else, age will rob the body of its vitality. One point of Shriver’s novel is that nothing lasts, that healthy bodies will inevitably be overtaken by decay and disease. All that smugness might one day be — like so many other things — a source of regret.

Unlike her husband, Serenata Terpsichore has always exercised regularly — to the point where, at 60, she is contemplating a knee replacement. Serenata is an insular, self-contained person. She has always resented it when something she enjoys doing becomes trendy. If she discovers a band or a kind of footwear, she hates knowing that “whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasm or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity.”

Serenata is married to Remington Alabaster, probably because he is the only other human whose company she finds tolerable. Remington thinks Serenata wants “to hog all the benefits” of her habits and can’t abide anyone else enjoying them. To Remington, Serenata’s “lack of communal ties is a little chilling,” but Serenata has “no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”

Serenata and Remington have a daughter named Valeria who largely ignored them before deciding that she forgave them for unspecified wrongdoing. Now Valeria wants to save their souls with born-again fanaticism. Their son Deacon, on the other hand, was apparently born evil and has no desire to change. Deacon plays a relatively small role but he’s the only likable character in the novel. Remington bemoans the fact that their kids grew up to be white trash. Serenata and Remington can at least bond over their failure as parents.

The first third of the novel addresses Remington’s training and participation in a marathon, which Serenata not-so-secretly views with derision. During the marathon, Remington meets and later hires a sexy fitness trainer who uses the professional name Bambi Buffer. Bambi encourages Remington to complete the marathon and then to move on to the latest trend, triathlons. Training is important, Remington decides, because “Life comes down to nothing more than the motion of the body through space.” “Traversing distances,” in his view, is “all there is to do.”

Most of the characters suspect Serenata of undermining Remington out of envy. With a gimpy knee, she can no longer compete with runners, and she doesn’t look as hot on her bicycle as the gear-clad babes. Serenata, on the other hand, justly worries that something catastrophic will happen to Remington, given that he is in no condition (and never will be) to compete in a triathlon. I give Shriver credit for being fair to both perspectives. Serenata might not understand why Remington feels a need to prove himself, and Remington might not understand why Serenata is so unsupportive, but the reader will understand them both.

At some point, the story detours to provide a surprisingly contrived explanation of how Remington lost his government job to political correctness. Her reliance on superficial caricatures rather than her customary deep probe of an issue is disappointing. Some of the points made by Remington and Serenata are sound — of course we shouldn’t automatically believe accusations of workplace abuse or harassment simply because they are made, and employers often rely on pretexts to fire aging employees before they qualify for a full pension — but the allegations of work rule violations that gave Remington a new life of leisure, and the questioning he endures (apparently with no civil service protections whatsoever), are so unrealistic that they damage the novel’s credibility. Fortunately, the detour is relatively brief.

Shriver took the risk of writing about two disagreeable characters. Readers who need to like characters to like a book might be turned off by Serenata and her husband. As Remington eventually tells Serenata, she is so separate from others, so disdainful of the need for company and contemptuous of their support, that she seems a creature of self-satisfied intellect, devoid of empathy. She has excluded everyone but Remington, including her children, from her bubble. Remington, on the other hand, is just plain stubborn, which might explain why their marriage has survived. He is also too easily taken in by the hot trainer, although that's a common enough failing of aging men.

So The Motion of the Body Through Space is about fitness and trends and families and the conflict between self and being part of something larger. Readers might draw their own lessons from those themes, but the humility that accompanies aging is the novel’s final lesson. “But this brand of humility wasn’t the sort you graciously embraced. It was foisted on you. You grew humble because you had been humbled.” At the same time, the epiphany that the great benefit of growing old is letting go (i.e., no longer caring about the world’s problems because you know you will die before the apocalypse) is one I hope I never have.

The penultimate chapter reads like a suspense novel as the reader wonders how Remington will fare in his greatest challenge. It is the best part of the novel. The rest of the ride is uneven, like the gravel road on which Remington wipes out while biking. Still, the story is always engaging. I am a fan of Shriver’s work and I enjoyed nearly all of this novel despite hitting a couple of potholes along the path to the novel's conclusion.

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