What happens to a dream deferred.

So Much for That
Lionel Shriver

I wonder, when The Great Gatsby first came out, and people first started to read it, if they had the idea that they were reading what would eventually come to be called the Great American Novel. It's so easy, in the glare of hindsight, to imagine all of these first readers sitting down in their book-lined studies in their smoking jackets and sucking contemplatively on their pipes as they read In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since...

I ask because I actually did have the thought, while reading So Much for That, that future generations will certainly recognize it as one of the most important books of the early years of the twenty-first century. If the 1900s were about defining and achieving the American dream, the 2000s, so far, have been about what happens when that dream explodes. And nobody has yet so completely and incisively tackled that topic as Lionel Shriver does, here.

Shepherd Knacker has been planning, since his twenties, for what he calls "The Afterlife." The plan is this: at some point, he will have saved enough money to pull up his middle-class suburban roots and move abroad, to some third world country where life is slower, simpler. He will escape the rat race. He will win the game. Now, at age forty-eight, Shep has finally saved up close to a million dollars. He buys airline tickets for Pemba, a tropical African island off the coast ofTanzania. He confronts his prickly wife Glynis with an ultimatum: She can come if he wants, but he is giving up his job, and he is going, whether she likes it or not. Glynis starts to shake her head almost before he's finished speaking. Shep can't go. He can't give up his job. Because she's going to need his health insurance.

Glynis has mesothelioma, a rare and virulent form of cancer. So Shep defers his dream, and throws his efforts into taking care of his wife’s myriad needs without jeopardizing his job, and the health insurance that comes with it. But the coverage itself is shoddy, and only pays forty percent of the costs of Glynis's treatment. The rest has to come from Shep's savings, and each chapter begins by showing the amount currently in his bank account, dwindling. As the plot advances advance the number plummets, and so, I have to tell you, did my stomach.

Shep is not alone in his struggles. His best friend and business partner, Jackson Burdina, has a daughter, Flicka, with a neurological disease called Riley-Day syndrome, and he knows all too well the ways in which insurance companies will try to cheat innocent consumers. This allows the men to take many walks in the park together, debating the "current" state of health care inAmerica, railing against its ills, and brainstorming to find a better way.

When Ron Charles of the Washington Post Book World reviewed this book, he marveled at Shriver’s ability put her finger so squarely on the pulse of a nation currently raging over health insurance reform. And it’s true that Shriver does this. This is not a book where you are left to come up with your own conclusions. Shriver has her thesis in mind and she works toward it for six hundred pages. She never comes right out and says that socialized health insurance is the answer, but her position is clear: the CURRENT system (as of two weeks ago) is not helping anybody but the insurance companies. And she uses visceral images to show us this. Her characters don’t bravely expire from breast cancer, resigned to their fates. They panic as they leak blood from various orifices, they have surgeries to cut the nerve that induces vomiting. Their diseases are graphic, and haven’t been sanitized for public consumption—as maybe they shouldn’t be.

And have you ever noticed, too, that when politicians pick people out of crowds to use as examples for their positions as to why health insurance should or shouldn’t be offered to the masses, they choose the firefighters, the law students, the mothers of six or seven? As if these people are more worth saving than the bus driver, the slacker, the childless parent? Well, Shriver doesn’t do that, either. Her characters—as in her previous works—are prickly, and hard to love. Glynis is a woman ruled by resentment and pettiness, and Flicka is a physically repugnant and difficult teenager. It would have been easy for Shriver to make them both cute and cuddly and brave, so that we love them, and we feel for them. I would have. But this is why she’s the famous, prize-winning author and I’m not: she doesn’t go there. And she doesn’t need to. Because by the end of this book, it doesn’t matter if Glynis was a serial killer. You feel like she is a real person, in the way that you don’t, about the abstract idea of the grandmother from Topeka, the schoolteacher from Denver. There's nothing more tragic than a life not lived. (But I also want to point out that this book is not nearly the depressing drain that I thought it would be. So if you're worried that it might be too dark, too much? Don't be. It's strangely uplifting, for all that.)

I don’t want to make the mistake of so many other reviewers who have tackled this book: it isn’tall about the health insurance angle. Yes, that’s covered, but when describing this book to someone who’s never heard of it, having only a few lines to do it? I don’t think it would even come up. Because So Much for That is really so much more than a book about healthcare reform, and I think to not acknowledge that it is, does Shriver a great disservice.

What Shriver is really writing about is that American dream, of a house, a job, two kids, and a fat bank account. Where does it come from? It’s Lionel Shriver’s view that we’re told that we should want those things. As Jackson Burdina would put it, the “Mooches” tell the “Mugs,” the poor working saps, that they really, really want to spend their lives in an office, so that the Mooches can spend theirs on a beach. Everyone laughs at Shep Knacker’s dream for himself—a life in which he doesn’t do or contribute anything—but why is this less odd, or strange, than the spending the majority of your time working, so that someone else doesn’t have to?

Look, Shriver is saying. There is no one-size fits all life. We don't all have to want the same thing. There are as many different American dreams as there are Americans. This one is Shep’s.

What’s yours?

Rating: 5 of 5 stars