So Much for That
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From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World comes a searing, ruthlessly honest new novel about a marriage both stressed and strengthened by the demands of serious illness.Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retreat to the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with "talking, thinking, seeing, and being"—and enough sleep. When he sells his home repair business for a cool million dollars, his dream finally seems within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years, has concocted endless excuses why it's never the right time to go. Weary of working as a peon for the jerk who bought his company, Shep announces he's leaving for a Tanzanian island, with or without her.Just returned from a doctor's appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep can't go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. But their policy only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep's nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain.Enriched with three medical subplots that also explore the human costs of American health care, So Much for That follows the profound transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor. In defiance of her dark subject matter, Shriver writes a page-turner that presses the question: How much is one life worth?
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In case you haven't noticed, Lionel Shriver is my new favorite author. Unsentimental, at times abrupt, but ultimately kind, she writes with a rare precision and clarity about human emotions and connections. She reminds me so much of George Eliot in her ability to capture people's struggles with life choices - large and small. This book is about so much I can't seem to describe it: terminal cancer, marriage, parenting, disability, love, friendship, money. I guess it's about the costs of things and the value of a life. It's hard to read a book that's 450 pages about a husband taking care of his wife as she dies of aggressive cancer - it's gross and uncomfortable and depressing. Somehow this writer makes the subject bearable. She reminds us that we all have to participate in the decline and death of a loved one at least once in our lives - more than once, if we're lucky.
The first half of So Much For That was incredibly difficult to get through. It felt like there were too many lectures, and too little characterization. The second half moved at a much better clip, but unfortunately this book felt too much like “American Health Insurance for Dummies.” Jackson, for the first half of the book, seemed to exist solely as a mouthpiece for the author. Shep and Glynis, who were the heart of the story, seemed murky and distant, much like a picture from a pinhole camera. The prose is wonderful in much of the book, but it is too flawed to recommend.
