Lionel Shriver’s new novel is one she hopes Barack and Michelle Obama will read.
“Maybe this is a vanity, but I just have a desperate desire to get this book to the Obamas,” the formidable female novelist with a male name said of So Much for That.
She was on the phone from Chicago, where she’s touring with this, her ninth novel — a page-turner about two American couples coping with Godawful health problems that, because of the inadequacies of the U.S. health care system, bring them to the brink of bankruptcy.
Shriver, an American living in London, said: “I did a reading Tuesday night in New York. I meant this half in jest, because I didn’t seriously expect my audience would be able to do anything about this, but I said, ‘Anybody out there who knows how to get this book to Obama, let me know.’ ”
Her voice taking on a tone of wonder, she went on: “Someone came up to me afterward and said that a good friend of hers was a speechwriter for Obama and she would definitely be able to get it to him. She bought a copy and I dedicated it to President Obama, so we’ll see.”
The novel’s protagonist, Shepherd Armstrong Knacker — called Shep, the common dogs’ name — is a patient, capable guy of 49 who sold his successful handyman business for $1 million but has ended up working for the repulsive new owner.
He’s been married for 27 years to Glynis, a lean, elegant woman of 51 who’s as brittle as he is pliable. She’s an artisan who works in metal but hasn’t produced much during her career.
At the beginning of the book, just as he’s about to pull the plug on his humdrum job and escape to an island off the east coast of Africa, she lets him know she has been diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare type of cancer.
Shriver, best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), fashions an intensely readable novel from the gloomy stuff of serious illness, imminent death and personal financial collapse.
Piling on the misfortunes, she has Shep’s best friend, Jackson, and wife Carol raising a teenager with familial dysautonomia, an extremely rare condition that makes the girl’s life cruelly hard. Plus, in a darkly comic subplot, Jackson, hoping to surprise Carol, undergoes penis enlargement surgery that ends up being badly botched.
Meanwhile, Shep, like the Biblical Job, is forced to shoulder yet another financial burden when his father has to enter a nursing home. And there — wouldn’t you know it? — Gabe Knacker contracts a Clostridium difficile infection.
‘I was worried about the whole topical territory,” Shriver, 52, confessed when asked about the heavy subject matter. “I was concerned that readers simply wouldn’t want to read about illness and death. It’s the last thing we really want to think about, but it’s a big part of life.
“The book is asking the question whether or not Glynis’s three miserable extra months of life were worth $2 million. You realize Shep doesn’t really have any choice. You don’t say, at the outset, ‘I’m sorry, but my wife isn’t worth that much money.’ ”
Many of the chapters are prefaced with a summary of the Knackers’ financial worth. It stands at $731,778.56 at the beginning of Chapter One and, as specialists whose services aren’t covered by their insurer are consulted and new chemotherapy cocktails are tried, the sum steadily erodes.
Shriver, who spends part of her time in Brooklyn, said: “I’m personally dismayed that Obama took the single-payer system off the table from the beginning. I think that was a big mistake.
“Rather surprisingly, considering how successfully so-called socialized medicine has been demonized in the United States, Americans do poll, in majority, as supporting a single-payer system.
“If we took the same money we’re spending on private health insurance and simply turned it into a nationwide system, so that the risk pool was the whole country, we could give health care to everybody for the same money.”
She hasn’t experienced life-threatening illness in England with which to test the limits of its National Health Service. The worst that has happened recently is that she stabbed her hand with a kitchen knife while trying to take the pit out of an avocado.
“At least I was free to worry about ‘Is this going to affect my ability to type?’ What I was not worrying about is, ‘How much is this going to set me back?’
“Certainly I pay considerable taxes [in the U.K.] to support the NHS, so I would never make the mistake of describing the system as free. But at the same time, I also have the experience of paying taxes and getting something for my money.”
By contrast, in the States she has “a very hard time pointing to real things in my life that I get out of my taxes on the federal level. The things that we can touch and feel, that make a real difference to our lives, are mostly municipal.”
S o Much for That, published by HarperCollins, is not a mere polemic, even though Shep’s friend Jackson converses mostly in anti-government rants.
It meets the requirements of a good novel, as expressed by respected critic Laura Miller on Salon.com.
These include “Make your main character want something,” “Make your main character do something” and “A sense of humour couldn’t hurt.”
Shriver, who gave herself the name Lionel (in preference to Margaret) when she was 15, has the skills to deliver a subtle, intelligent novel that is more than just a vehicle for ideas.
“Fiction is meant to be an entertainment,” she said. “I’m glad if it edifies, as well, but that has to be secondary.”
Its best passages include this one, in which Shep, his net worth reduced to $274,530.68, finds that Glynis has dropped off to sleep on the back porch just as he is about to serve Jackson and Carol a fancy dinner.
He stirred the coals on the barbecue. He’d started the fire too early, and it would be too hot for the steaks. They’d been eighteen dollars a pound. It didn’t matter. But if overcooking them didn’t matter, then he shouldn’t have sprung for New York strips in the first place. He was beginning to lose a grip on why they were having those two for dinner. He was losing a grip on why anyone had anyone to dinner. Why anyone talked to anyone.
In the book reviews she writes in British newspapers, Shriver can be brutally hard on other writers’ novels. She savaged Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest when it came out, and also Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed — which, like her Kevin book, drew inspiration from the Columbine school shooting.
This lays her own work open to criticism.
“It’s a dangerous business,” she agreed.
“If I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t review books at all. The problem is, you make personal enemies, and those are never in your interests.”
