Compulsive exercise

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

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,