2023-08-23 13:28:41
There are few writers with as much desire to complicate their lives as Lionel Shriver (1957, North Carolina), a determined hard subject enthusiast. debuted with the brave ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, about the mother of a teenager who has committed a massacre, a controversial ‘bestseller’ that was published shortly after the Columbine massacre. She has written about terminal illness (‘All this for what’), against the dictatorship of thinness (‘Big Brother’), against the elites (‘Los Mandibles’) and romantic love (‘The world after the birthday’).
Now his fury -also his extraordinary lucidity- addresses the contemporary obsession with being fit and against the industry of thefitness‘. ‘The movement of the body through space’ (Anagram) is about a sixty-year-old married couple that goes into crisis when he, Remington, decides run a marathon Defying age, common sense and the patience of his wife, Serenata, a born runner who silently suffers from arthritis. A hilarious novel, full of rage and tenderness, about what it really means to be married and the stupidity of society.
Compared to his other novels, it seems that his view of the couple has improved a bit. Is it so?
This novel is about the ending. There is a certain point at which you implicitly enter into a contract with your spouse: you will stay with them until old age, whatever that entails. I feel that in my own marriage: a deep obligation to honor marriage vows now that “in sickness and in health” seems so much more pertinent. Separating at sixty violates that unwritten contract. Greatly increases the chance of ending your life alone.
When passion fades and two people grow old together, do relationships get stronger?
Yes. As you get older with someone, the theater of love tends to disappear. My husband and I don’t usually buy each other Christmas presents, and we rarely celebrate birthdays. What remains is to face life’s greatest challenges: how to age well, perhaps how to survive a serious illness, and finally, how to die.
Political correctness has had a lethal effect on contemporary literature
Aren’t there enough novels about mature love?
Probably not. Most novels and movies focus on the beginning of relationships, and culturally we are much more interested in young people.
You like sports, why did you decide to write against ‘fitness’?
Exercise is not the same as sport. Our obsession with fitness has nothing to do with being good at playing, for example, soccer. It is about self-actualization. In becoming the best version of yourself that you can be. But this ‘better self’ is defined purely in physical terms. It is about surface, appearance. It’s a superficial version of perfection. Like being skinny.
All I see in obsessive fitness people is wasted time and mind-numbing boredom.
He also dedicated a novel to the obsession with losing weight, ‘Big Brother’.
If your goal is to be superficial, playing sports requires a lot of work. Not eating at least doesn’t take away your time. But the physically ambitious now spend hours upon hours in the gym each week. When I see people who are so conspicuously polished that they could only have become that way by making exercise their number one priority in life, I don’t even find them attractive. All I see is a lot of wasted time and mind-numbing boredom.
Do you run regularly? The descriptions of knee pain are so well written that it’s hard to believe that it doesn’t.
Oh yeah. I ran for 45 years. For decades I had a routine of running ten miles every other day. But I’ve had arthritis in my knees since I was in my early forties, finally reaching a point eight years ago where I came home in a lot of pain from running. I decided to save my knees for something I love: tennis. I don’t have knee replacements yet, which I’m afraid of, but I won’t be able to put them off forever.
“Chronic disgust, call it misanthropy if you like, is exhausting. Every day I expend enormous amounts of energy in outrage, disbelief, and rage.”
You have written about the disease and this novel is also very physical, why are you so interested in the body?
I have always been very interested in the relationship between the self and the body. Being a person living in a body, over which you only have marginal control, is incredibly complicated. I have always been a very physical person, and since I was a child I have strived to maintain the body I was born in, for comfort and aesthetic pleasure. But I think of my body more like a house that I need to keep tidy. My body is not me, and I don’t want to be remembered for how many crunches I did. The strange thing is that we know that we ourselves are not the same as our bodies, but we happily judge other people based on their appearance.
In the novel there is a fierce criticism of political correctness, it is noticeable that progressive ideas infuriate her, why?
I have quite an ‘anti-woke’ pedigree. I write a lot of journalism, and the crazy stuff on the left, especially since around 2012, has been fuel for my columns. I find the whole ‘progressive’ package regressive, anti-liberal, humorless, judgmental and dreary. I personally hate being told what to do, and especially being told what to write. Political correctness has had a lethal effect on contemporary literature.
All his novels exude a deep misanthropy. At what point is the degree of disappointment of him with humanity?
I suffer from chronic disgust. That is why the end of the novel is such a relief. Serenade stops worrying. She takes refuge in a liberating apathy. Chronic disgust, call it misanthropy if you like, is exhausting. I spend hours every day reading newspapers and expend enormous amounts of energy in outrage, disbelief, and anger. I can certainly see myself letting go of all that exasperated involvement in human affairs at some point. Just deciding that I don’t give a shit about anything. Disconnection, especially at the end of your life, is highly recommended.
My body is not me, and I don’t want to be remembered for how many crunches I did.
The book is also about smoke sellers and those who blindly follow a leader; Do you think there is more sheep today?
At first, the Internet seemed to throw us into a world of individualism and whimsy. We could find what and whom we wanted. But it has become a compliance machine. I have been horrified (that is what my next novel is about) the social manias that have spread throughout the world, sometimes in a matter of days, thanks to internet connectivity. Suddenly everyone is consumed by transgenderism. Suddenly everyone is caught up in sexual harassment. Suddenly everyone believes that the only way to fight a pandemic is to shut down the entire world, and right after, suddenly everyone is marching down the street and putting up ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs on their front lawns. All those things leave me cold. I don’t have the gene for social contagion. I am immune.
#writer #Lionel #Shriver #gene #social #contagion #immune