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One for the knacker’s yard
14 March 2010 Reviewed by Kevin Power
So Much For That
By Lionel Shriver
Harper Collins, €15.60
A few years ago, Martin Amis began his review of Robert Bly’s trenchantly heterosexual masculinity manifesto Iron John by pointing out that ‘iron’ (‘iron hoof ‘) was Cockney rhyming slang for ‘poof’.
A similar problem - and it’s a problem, above all, of cultural and linguistic context - besets Lionel Shriver’s new novel.
To get this out of the way at the start, the protagonist of So Much For That is named Shepherd Knacker. That’s right: Shepherd Knacker. I spent a good two or three days chuckling over this before I could even bring myself to sit down and read the book.
But this was only the beginning of my troubles. Every few pages, I had to put the thing down and wipe my eyes. Why? Because of sentences like this one: ‘‘The website designer shouted, ‘Yo, Knacker, left something behind, didn’t you?’ "
This is not, of course, a strictly literary response. But the fact remains that, for anyone familiar with the Irish demotic, a protagonist named Knacker is a problem.
It’s like calling your main character John Scumbag or Joe Chav.
But we can’t blame an entire novel for the laughing-jags induced by one disastrously-named character. Unfortunately, So Much For That doesn’t do a whole lot to redeem itself.
It’s the story of a happily-married American couple, the Knackers ( I know, I know).The husband - we’d better call him Shep - has sold his household-repair business for a million dollars and plans to retire to a third-world country where his money will enable him to live a paradisiacal life.
But his dream retirement (he calls it The Afterlife) becomes suddenly impossible when his wife, Glynis, is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
What follows is a lengthy and largely predictable journey through America’s broken healthcare industry.
Shep takes Glynis to the oncologist; her condition worsens, then improves, then worsens again.
Because the treatment Glynis needs isn’t covered by Shep’s double dealing insurers, we get to watch as his Afterlife fund dwindles to nothing: almost every chapter begins with an update on the bottom line of his Merrill Lynch savings account.
In a subplot, we learn about Shep’s friends, Jackson and Carol, whose teenage daughter suffers from a nerve disorder that is bankrupting them. There are long conversations about the state of the American healthcare system, which aim at topicality but which stop the narrative stone dead, and which perhaps should have been saved up and used in an op-ed piece for the Huffington Post.
Shriver, author of the criminally overrated We Need to Talk About Kevin, has delivered another Big Issue novel. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Big Issue was school shootings. In So Much For That, the Big Issue is America’s Obama-inspired healthcare imbroglio.
Like most Big Issue novels, So Much For That goes about its business in deadly earnest, cheerfully unencumbered by anything like a sense of irony.
As an intervention in the healthcare debate, the story of the Knackers tells us what we already know:
that American health insurance companies are greedy and soulless, that being ill in America costs a lot of money, and that something should probably be done to fix this.
The current healthcare debate in America has arisen because the American commitment to individualism is incompatible with democracy’s central tenet, which is that the state is the people. But Shriver shows no awareness of this: instead we get a lot of repetitive ranting from Jackson about how the country is run by gangsters and villains.
As a novel, So Much For That suffers from the same flaw that We Need to Talk About Kevin did: it is frequently ludicrous. The sociopathic teen in that novel went about massacring his fellow students and teachers with a bow-and-arrow, which seemed to be Shriver’s fraidy cat way of avoiding saying anything controversial about gun control. So Much For That has more than its fair share of silly bits, none more so than the baffling sequence in which Jackson has his penis surgically extended, with ruinous consequences.
I read So Much For That in the same week that I read Joshua Ferris’s newly-published The Unnamed.
Both novels are about the ways in which chronic illnesses affect families. But the Ferris novel is a haunting parable that becomes, in its latter pages, a visionary statement about human experience.
So Much For That is overlong and often banal - we get to read about what the Knackers and their friends talk about over dinner (Michael Jackson),we get to read about Shep’s lay about sister Beryl - in short, the book is full of material that isn’t relevant to the theme. As an intervention in a public debate, this book has nothing new to say; as a novel, it is bloated and improbable.
So much for that.
Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock (Lilliput), and the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
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