Skip to main content

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

By
This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable.

The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his undoing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorder, familial dysautonomia. And Shep’s octogenarian father requires long-term care after he falls at home and then becomes infected with an antibiotics-resistant superbug. By the end of the novel Shep’s retirement nest egg has all but disappeared, going to hospitals, labs, out-of-network specialists, and a nursing home.

Full disclosure-- this book can be a huge downer. Anyone who has had even secondhand experience with a prolonged medical crisis will identify with the mostly unpleasant situations in this book, but let’s face it, those same people who have had experience with prolonged medical crises may not want to read a novel detailing the agonies and finanicial stresses associated with terminal cancer or extended care. There was a point where I considered putting this book down, but it has a surprise ending that ties things up rather nicely and gives the reader a smidgen of hope. This is a polemic that targets the American way of healthcare the way Upton Sinclair targeted the meat industry in The Jungle. So Much for That certainly doesn’t make the US look like a medical paradise, pre or post Obamacare. It would probably be impossible for a novel on American healthcare to be anything but depressing. At least it leaves you with a lot to think about, but I think I'll choose a more uplifting book for my next read.

Comments

  1. KenAugust 15, 2011 at 5:34 PM

    Oh, and here's the trailer for the movie version of WNtTaK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLRgAe2jLaw
    Love, love, love Tilda.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

By
The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her?  Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable?  Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea .  It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre .  I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances.  Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall.  Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage.  All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...
Post a Comment
Read more