THE MOTION OF THE BODY THROUGH SPACE

LIONEL SHRIVER

Borough, 352pp, £16.99, ebook £7.99

A couple, Serenata and Remington, are approaching their twilight years. Serenata, formerly a fitness fanatic, now has destroyed knees, while Remington, her previously sedentary and redundant husband, chooses this precise moment to take up exercise and compete in a gruelling triathlon. This is the story of a marriage, an obsession and betrayal. Within it, Shriver interweaves bugbear themes of diversity, cultural appropriation and political correctness. Christian Lorentzen, writing in the FT, described it as a ‘satire on fitness zealotry with a side-serving of culturewar intrigue’. There are ‘poignant insights about ageing’ which are delivered ‘inside a novel that goes down like a sour pill’. For him, it is ‘an obstacle course of a book’, that makes for ‘a diverting spectacle, if not always a coherent novel’.

Allan Massie, in the Scotsman, enjoyed it. Shriver ‘writes bold and fearless comedy and delights in slaughtering the sacred cows of the stupid times we live in’. For him, ‘Lionel Shriver is an exuberant novelist, fertile in ideas, robust in argument and disdainful of economy.’

And in the New York Times, Joshua Ferris described the book as ‘no wilting lily. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds.’ Typically of Shriver, Serenata is an unattractive, unsympathetic character; ‘her refusal to extend sympathy to anyone but herself makes generosity toward her a very hard sell’. Alfred Hickling in the Guardian observed that Shriver’s inspiration for this ‘scabrously funny novel’ may have come out of her realisation that she had herself become more dedicated to taking exercise than to writing.