Jonathan Mcaloon

The fitness fetish: The Motion of the Body Through Space, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

Just when Serenata is forced to abandon her life of compulsive exercise, her formerly sedentary husband decides to run a marathon

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In her 2010 novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver examined the American healthcare system with a spiky sensitivity. Big Brother (2013) took on American obesity, and The Mandibles (2016) thoroughly imagined a doomsday economy. Shriver’s latest book, The Motion of the Body Through Space, casts the same keen eye over the ‘fetishising of fitness’.

Serenata Terpsichore, a voiceover artist in her early sixties living in New York State, has been a compulsive exerciser all her life. When her knees give out, she is deprived not only of an outlet and a private routine but part of her identity. It is at this moment her formerly sedentary husband Remington Alabaster, a one-time civil servant, announces his wish to run a marathon.

Naturally suspicious of mass participation or groupthink — not ‘a member of anything. Not a professional organisation, not a political party’ — Serenata believes her hobby was an extension of her independence, whereas the general popularity of exercise is due to herd suggestibility, ‘imposed from the outside. It’s a contagion, like herpes.’

Though unsympathetic to her husband’s new interest, she decides to let it exhaust itself. But when Remington finishes his marathon in woeful time, he is accompanied by Bambi Buffer. She’s an intimidatingly attractive young woman who has already signed him up to compete in a ‘MettleMan’ triathlon. It isn’t long before Remington starts bringing his local ‘tri club’, a gang of dead-eyed or damaged fanatics, round for Serenata to feed, while she shuffles about waiting for a knee replacement.

The result is satisfying when contained. But the novel can be unbalanced by chunks of unsynthesised ideology that are consistent with its central concerns — the passage of time, the feeling of being left behind, ignored and resented in equal measure by subsequent generations — yet somehow don’t seem organically generated by them.

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