We need to talk about jogging

Lionel Shriver’s new novel is a wry satire on fitness fanatics, says Francesca Carington

LTHE MOTION OF THE BODY THROUGH SPACE by Lionel Shriver 352pp, Borough, £16.99, ebook £7.99

ionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin (as well as the terrific story collection Property), is famous for her opinions. On cultural appropriation, most notably, but also on the perils of metropolitan wokeness, immigration, and, now, with her novel The Motion of the Body Through Space, fitness fanaticism.

This unfocused, if entertaining, satire revolves around a 60-something couple and their deranged attitudes towards exercise. Serenata is a judgmental voice-over artist who has obsessively exercised for hours every day, though age and a dodgy knee are catching up with her. (Not unlike Shriver, a lifelong runner.) She’s furious when her previously unfit husband Remington announces that he’s going to run a marathon, since running has always been “her” thing. As Serenata’s ailing joints force her to dial it down, Remington’s fervour grows steadily more extreme. He resolves to do a triathlon, and is sucked into a cultish “Tri Club” overseen by the impossibly ripped, uber-irritating personal trainer Bambi. Serenata can’t bring herself to support Remington’s pursuit of what he sees as heroism – firstly, out of jealousy; though later out of fear as it starts to endanger his life. Instead, they argue about it. Relentlessly (and repetitively).

The dry and acerbic Serenata is an excellent creation. She feels she “invented” exercise, and rankles at any of her hobbies being colonised by coolness. (Aside from being into running, she got a tattoo, used a scrunchie, wore Ugg boots and liked sushi before everyone else did.) She’s a bit of a loner: “Most people regarded Serenata as stand-offish, and she was fine with that; being seen as a woman who kept others at bay helped to keep them at bay.” Though, as her neighbour points out, for a woman who doesn’t care about other people, she certainly cares a lot about what other people get up to. She is disdainful of Remington’s willingness to take exercise with others: “I have no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba,” she sniffs.

She knows she’s in the tight spot of a hypocrite, and is forced to examine her own attitude towards exercise. “I did not love running… The only good part is having run,” she tells Remington. And yet,

“exercise, of all things, had grown nonsensically bound up with who she was”.

Still, Remington and his tri-friends’ activities amount to a more intense mania. Bambi tells them: “The one thing you never allow yourself to question is why you’re doing this in the first place.” Leaving Serenata plenty of time to theorise. Her daughter is a born-again Christian, allowing for sometimes clunky parallels to be drawn between religion and “the church of exercise”. She also muses on the culture of fitness as a “new materialism”, which promises superiority, immortality, the triumph of the will (“Leni Riefenstahl, where are you?” thinks Serenata) over the body, and, for an old man ousted from his job by a young black woman, a way of staving off a “state of emasculation”.

Ah yes, for Shriver has more than one axe to grind. When the topic of cultural appropriation comes up, it’s unsurprising – and as gleefully contrarian as you’d expect from Shriver. Serenata gets in trouble for adopting minority accents in her voiceovers, while an extended flashback deals with Remington’s firing. His employment tribunal ends with his tormentors, odious caricatures of wokeness, concluding: “And not only are you a misogynist, but you’re a xenophobe who blames POCs for their own enslavement.”

This unnuanced treatment is, to use a term Serenata loathes, “problematic”, with these social-activist Stalinists so simplistically drawn that Remington, the victimised member of the “straight white patriarchy” who sees them as such, could easily be mistaken as the subject of Shriver’s satire here.

Mostly, Shriver’s a sharp writer and funny, her ruminations on the body and ageing wry and well-observed. And this latest novel is full of her acid wit – with an emphasis on the acid.

ACID WIT Lionel Shriver