Uncool runnings

Lionel Shriver keeps the laughs coming in this tale of a marriage put under strain by fitness fanaticism.

“body recalled the diagrams of human musculature in anatomy text-books”. Remington represents a challenge for her. He becomes one of her team and Serenata finds them invading their house. Her reasoned arguments and warnings are brushed aside. Fanatics don’t listen to reason. Can their marriage survive? Or will Rem collapse dead before it does so?

“Tri,” the ghastly Bambi says, “is a belief system, but the belief is in yourself.”

“Isn’t that on the slight side?” Serenata replies. “It sounds awfully like egotism.”

It is indeed that, though solipsism might be more accurate. Moreover, this cult of fitness is narcissism. What has happened to America, to the City on the Hill?

These questions are at the heart of Shriver’s writing. She is appalled by the American decline, the retreat from adulthood, the kneejerk intolerance, the eagerness to take offence.

And it’s not just the good old USA. Serenata recalls reading about an event in England where “the contestants start to hallucinate... One runner said the object of the exercise was to feel ‘dead’... We invented the computer and put men on the moon. Now we’re running in manic circles, like tigers churning themselves to butter. A once-great civilization, disappearing up its ass.”

Like so much in the 21 century, it’s enough to make you weep. The alternative to weeping, as Byron said in Don Juan, is laughter. For Serenata, her husband’s obsession with the body would be comical if she didn’t also recognise it as “a battening down of the hatches”. You push your body to the limits and even beyond, so that you don’t have to think. It’s a rejection of ordinary social life.