I resisted this book. I read sporadically at first, wondering if my reluctance stemmed from the topic (SO MUCH FOR THAT concerns the bell that tolls for us all) or some flaw in the novel itself. In the end, the voices pulled me in. Even in (especially in) the throes of the most extreme stress, the characters are smart cookies: frank, fast-thinking, often sarcastic, always interesting. They are so articulate, they could pass for embittered stand-up comics.
Their territory, however, is not realism à la Jodi Picoult. Lionel Shriver is the anti-Jodi Picoult (each wrote a novel about a high school killer, but how different they are!). I do not mean to malign either writer. I love Picoult's down-to-earthness, how she mixes dinner dishes, soccer games and homework with life's gravest moral and spiritual dilemmas. Shriver, however, is to Picoult what an indie film is to a Lifetime movie. In SO MUCH FOR THAT, Shriver not only nails the expected pain and grief of terminal illness, childhood disease, sexual angst and financial roulette, but also brings out their absurdity.
When Shepherd Knacker sells his handyman company (Knack of All Trades) for a cool million, he thinks he is about to realize his dream (he calls it The Afterlife): to retire to some third-world country where a well-stocked investment account can last pretty much forever. He and his wife, Glynis, have gone on "research" trips throughout their 26-year marriage, but she always finds some drawback. At 48, he can't wait any longer (he has been marking time, working as an underling at his former company and paying too much rent for a suburban house). One day he buys plane tickets to Africa. He is determined to go, with or without his family. But that night, everything changes: Glynis tells him she has cancer, and the word afterlife now takes on a grimmer meaning.
Destiny has also played a cruel trick on Shep's best friend and co-worker, Jackson Burdina, and his wife, Carol. Their daughter, Flicka, was born with a rare genetic nervous-system disorder called Familial Dysautonomia (FD) and requires constant care ("It was like being a doctor yourself but without the golf. You were always on call"). Flicka isn't the blandly adorable dying kid you see in TV's medical melodramas; she is tough, furious, wildly intelligent --- and seriously suicidal.
Flicka and Jackson are two of a kind. His characteristic mode of expression is the rant, and his world view typically divides people into Mooches and Mugs --- those, particularly in the government, who cheat and squeeze and come out on top; and those who meekly accept their lot. His monologues are Shriver's principal mouthpiece for attacking the American health-care system and sundry other ills of modern life. Black comedy is Jackson's strategy for coping with fate. Uncomplaining servitude is Shep's.
Shriver's cutting wit and lack of sentimentality make her book particularly disturbing. Apparently affable doctors deliver death sentences in code (Shep thinks, "[A] doctor was like a handyman who, some appreciable percentage of the time, had to knock on your door and say, I'm sorry, but I cannot clear your drain. ... And then he walks away and maybe he waves, leaving you with scummy standing water in your bath"). Denial is described as "scroll down" versus "skip down." Chemo is "sick" and "surreal" and tantamount to bloodletting and leeches.
There is tenderness, too, but doled out judiciously. Shep's relationship with his aging father is as poignant as his relationship with his narcissistic sister, Beryl, is poisonous. And you cannot help but be moved by his observation, as he and Glynis wait for her surgery, that "only a warm hand on her neck seemed to make a difference. This was a time of the body. To communicate was to communicate with the body." Talk, in other words, has its limits.
Perhaps the core of SO MUCH FOR THAT is Shep's yearning for some protocol that suits his circumstances: "He couldn't see the utility of a civilization that had an etiquette for...placing the fork to the left of a plate, but as for what to do while your wife was sliced open you were on your own." Most of our reference points about illness are drawn from TV ("Cancer in the world of entertainment was a neat one-word expedient for the disposal of characters who had served their purpose...."), so no wonder Glynis's friends and family fall away as her illness progresses --- they have no idea what to do or say.
The downside of Shriver's acerbic, epigrammatic style is that the novel becomes a bit like a series of riffs on taboo subjects --- entertaining and provocative but emotionally unsatisfying. Although the characters are tested by adversity, they do not really evolve, and the parallels between Shep and Jackson, and Glynis and Flicka, are too heavily signposted. I also felt slightly cheated by shifts in tone toward the latter part of the book. First there is the intrusion of a grand guignol shocker (I won't be a spoiler, but believe me, this event is bizarre and off-key --- the plot is not so much twisted as totally distorted), then a sort-of-happy trick ending. Ironic fables are not my thing.
Still, in a world where books seem ever more formulaic, I love Shriver's willingness to take chances. She is to be congratulated for addressing the hard subjects that most people gloss over, and for doing so with complexity, honesty and humor. SO MUCH FOR THAT, with its explicit critique of the current state of medicine and this culture's benighted attitudes toward death, is horrifyingly timely.
