{"id":4341,"date":"2020-11-16T08:59:16","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T08:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4341"},"modified":"2020-11-16T09:03:31","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T09:03:31","slug":"lionel-shrivers-the-motion-of-the-body-through-space-misanthropy-marriage-and-exercise-in-a-crowded-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4341","title":{"rendered":"Lionel Shriver\u2019s The Motion of the Body Through Space: Misanthropy, marriage, and exercise in a crowded world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\nIf you feel an involuntary blush of irritation at a peleton of\ncyclists taking up half the lane, or clacking over\nself-congratulatory lattes as their bicycles comprising small\nfortunes take up the seating, if the thought of being crowded by\nother runners sweating and farting their way in lycra and flashy\nshoes along a fixed route while you take deep breaths and, like\neveryone else, hope your knee or ankle or hamstring is going to hold\nout has you wrinkling your nose in distaste, if a full swimming pool\nof splashing back and forth between lanes, a crowded lineup, a queue\non a mountain path has you wincing in dismay, or if exercise is\nsimply anathema, you\u2019ll have a great deal of empathy for Serenata,\nthe ageing antisocial character in Lionel Shriver\u2019s latest novel,\nThe Motion of the Body Through Space.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nShe\u2019s not a particularly nice person, which makes her like most of\nus, but what sets her apart, and what drives the plot, is that she is\nparticularly disdainful of people doing things in organised groups.\nIn danger of putting words on Shriver\u2019s page, there is no reason,\nto Serenata\u2019s mind, to gather in groups except insofar it is\nnecessary for survival. If she doesn\u2019t go so far as to call herself\na misanthrope, her husband certainly does, and she doesn\u2019t argue. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nOn a superficial level The\nMotion of the Body Through Space <\/em>is\nabout exercise and age, but beyond that it\u2019s about mortality and\nmarriage. There is also an inkling the character is Shriver. Not that\nShriver\u2019s husband decided to run a marathon after a lifetime of\nbeing elegantly slim and sedentary, but that Shriver, too, is in her\nearly 60s, has stated in at least one public lecture that she has\nknee trouble, and has been seen to exercise. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThe novel, it seems, has been written from her vantage point. She has\nnot, as she extolled in a lecture in Australia in 2016, stepped into\nsomeone else\u2019s shoes and put on their hat. Her criticism of recent\naccusations that white novelists writing characters belonging to a\nminority or oppressed society who was largely denied the telling of\ntheir own story, is to commit the crime of cultural appropriation,\nreceived predictable kickback from woke town criers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIn her keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2016,\nShriver argued that the very idea of being a writer was to put\nyourself in someone else\u2019s shoes, and to take the cultural\nappropriation view to its endpoint, there is no allowance for\nfiction, only memoir. In the world in which no-one is allowed to tell\nany story but their own, Shriver said: \u201cSomeone like me only\npermits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white\nfemale born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with\nbad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\u201cAnd here\u2019s the bugbear, here\u2019s where we really can\u2019t win. At\nthe same time that we\u2019re to write about only the few toys that\nlanded in our playpen, we\u2019re also upbraided for failing to portray\nin our fiction a population that is sufficiently various. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWhat Shriver had been receiving flak\nfor at the time, was her novel The Mandibles, <\/em>set\nin a near-future New York rendered a dystopia after a liberal\nsocialist government is elected. She came under fire for two\ncharacters specifically: a Mexican New York mayor, and an elderly\nblack woman suffering from dementia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThe intervening years have brought\nus The Motion of the Body Through Space <\/em>and\nshe seems to have perversely retreated into her own playpen. In a\nliterary equivalent of passive resistance, she\u2019s called her\ncritics\u2019 bluff and gone: \u2018alright, if that\u2019s what you want it,\nhow\u2019s this?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIn doing so she is not beyond lobbing a few balls at the political\ncorrectness watchdogs in what could be a game of cerebral fetch. She\ntakes aim through Serenata\u2019s husband, a senior civil servant who\nendures the ignominy of a disciplinary hearing chaired largely by\nself-righteously politically correct interrogators because as an\nelderly cis-het white guy, he momentarily lost his temper after being\ngoaded by his new, young, black, possibly queer female boss. Driven\nby cracking dialogue, it is an hilariously cynical passage that\nreveals Shriver\u2019s wicked sense of humour. A sense of humour which\nis often sadly lacking among her detractors. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nShe\u2019s the most delightful conservative I\u2019m happy to have on the\nbookshelf. And that\u2019s because she\u2019s clever, witty, stirs the pot,\nand in this book is also a bit of a softie, which is endearing. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nA masterful writer who imbues her\nsometimes deeply flawed characters with an interiority that demands\nempathy, Shriver\u2019s The Motion of the Body Through Space\n<\/em>is a witty excoriation of\ncontemporary society and its worship of the self. It has also forever\naltered my view of marathons, or even fun runs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThe Motion of the Body Through Space\nis published by HarperCollins Publishers in the UK and\ndistributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you feel an involuntary blush of irritation at a peleton of cyclists taking up half the lane, or clacking over self-congratulatory lattes as their bicycles comprising small fortunes take … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[1135],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4341"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4344,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions\/4344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}