Exercising Opinions

In We need to talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver featured a chillingly callous teenager who plans and executes a shooting at his school. Big Brother focused on an extremely obese man who is ‘eating himself to death’. So Much For That has a protagonist with terminal cancer, and is a biting indictment of the American healthcare system. As you see, Shriver specializes in tackling awkward, difficult, complicated topics that can make a reader uncomfortable.

In The Motion of the Body Through Space, she takes on the (distinctly American, in this rendition) cult of exercise. What can be wrong with exercise, you ask? Well, apart from the many people who jog slowly on sidewalks or bike a few miles now and again or take an exercise class at a gym, there is a growing community of extreme exercisers. They start jogging and then rapidly move on to running marathons, then ultra-marathons. They swim not laps but miles. They cycle not tens but hundreds of miles, over rough terrain. They spend huge amounts of money on equipment and gyms. They always have a higher number (reps, miles, events) to aim for. These are Shriver’s target.

Remington Alabaster (more on the names later) is in his sixties.

How he’d remained so slim, vigorous and nicely proportioned without any appreciable exercise was anyone’s guess. Oh, he walked places, and didn’t complain about taking the stairs if an elevator was out of order. But he’d never even experimented with one of those “seven minutes to a better body” routines, much less joined a gym. During lunch, he ate lunch.

Remington, unexpectedly retired from his job, decides to run a marathon. His wife, Serenata Terpsichore, is astonished and annoyed. She is no exercise slouch herself, normally running 10 miles a day with sets of 500 situps and pushups alongside. But Serenata now has bad knees, and even sitting in one position for half an hour is painful. She is out of the exerciser group, just when her husband is opting in.

Serenata’s objections are essentially cantankerous complaints that Remington’s modus operandi differs from hers. She is a loner, but he wants to join a marathon-training club. She did everything (exercising, hair scrunchies, tattoos) before it was cool, and resents it when others jump on the bandwagon. It bothers her that his ambition is ‘hopelessly trite’.

The whole supportiveness shtick might actually have been doable had he introduced his resolution with suitable chagrin: “I realize I’ll never manage to cover nearly the distances you have…” But no. He had to run a marathon.

One marathon down, Remington moves on to ‘MettleMan’, a triathlon-type event with even longer distances. He finds a new social group among his fellow trainers, pours money into his training, and hires a personal trainer called Bambi Buffer. (The name suggests that the character is a ludicrous, oversexed caricature, and so indeed she turns out to be. Disappointingly obvious, from Shriver)

Meanwhile, Serenata continues sniping from the sidelines:

“You do realize that organized endurance sport is an industry,” Serenata idly observed.

“Soft drinks are an industry,” Remington said. “We still buy Poland Spring soda water.”

“Your spiritual aspirations are being taken advantage of.”

“Poland Spring takes advantage of our thirst. Why shouldn’t MettleMan capitalize on my other thirsts? Someone might as well.”

Social justice would seem like an odd fellow plotline for extreme exercise, but that indeed is the other thread in this novel. Just in case you hadn’t noticed his race, Remington’s last name is, literally, Alabaster. His new boss, a young Nigerian-African, was the cause of his early retirement.

Unfortunately, Shriver heavily loads the dice here. The ‘diversity hire’ Lucinda Okonkwo is not only unqualified for her position, she is also incompetent and obnoxious. Remington, in contrast, is knowledgeable, wryly pleasant, capable and non-threatening. Shriver can be a bitingly clever writer, but this is so stupidly one-sided that there is no room for thoughtful discussion.

Meanwhile, Serenata has her own issues with identity politics. She is an audio reader, and:

“It’s gotten kinda not so great, for white readers of audiobooks to use accents. Especially of POCs.”

“Let me get this straight,” Serenata said. “I’m now supposed to deliver the dialogue of a coke dealer in Crown Heights as if he’s a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. ‘Yo bro, dat bitch ain’t no better than a ho, true dat’.” She’d given the line an aristocratic English snootery.

Again, Shriver seems unconscious of the fact that nonwhite audiobook readers are unlikely to be hired to read the voices of aristocratic English characters, while Serenata (an obvious alter ego for the author), it is made clear, should have the right to read in any voice and accent that she wants; she is being horribly wronged by all this concern about racism or representation.

About exercise, Serenata has plenty of self-awareness.

“Anyone who does less exercise than you is pathetic, and anyone who does more than you is a nut.”

Her thoughts on an aging body are also touching and full of self-realization, in that distinctly unsentimental Shriver way.

Throughout her life she had exercised, hard, for a duration, virtually every day. According to legend, she had therefore earned reprieve from the tawdry ailments of sedentary mortals — many of whom were in fact physically better prepared to go the distance into old age than Serenata was now . […] You couldn’t identify with the body’s powers without also identifying with its deficiencies and ugliness when those powers failed.

In contrast, the sections on social justice come across as a resentful rant.

Shriver has certainly made her views on cultural appropriation known, and on this topic, the characters in this novel are mere vehicles for her own fulminations. She seems to see herself as being the rare voice against the strawman of ‘PC culture’, but she’s just joining the Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham band here, and not even adding any unique perceptiveness or subtlety.