Lionel Shriver’s scabrously funny 15th novel presents a dyspeptic view of people in thrall to exercise ... It’s interesting that given her own obsessive exercise regimen, Shriver is prepared to admit to being part of the problem. The novel even goes so far as to posit a contemporary definition of what the word 'problematic' has come to mean: 'It’s, like, a great big giant word for everything that’s super bad.' Shriver’s contentious views on diversity are no secret ... The Motion of the Body Through Space is proof, if it were needed, that Shriver’s natural response to an open wound is to pour on more salt ... Shriver’s essential bugbear is that, taken to extremes, the concept of cultural appropriation prohibits the act of fiction writing itself ... The grand irony of course is that The Motion of the Body Through Space is a novel drawn from the first-hand experience of a writer who monitors her frequency of star jumps and has been on the receiving end of a pasting for her views on diversity. Certainly it’s problematic - but few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver.

The prospective thrill of a new novel by the iconoclast Lionel Shriver is located here, in anticipating the skewing of pieties, your pity be damned ... Her 15th novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, is certainly no wilting lily. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds ... I am enormously sympathetic to unsympathetic characters, and I greatly admire Shriver’s willingness in the early going to have other characters push back on Serenata’s absurd and caustic misanthropy. But when the exposition shifts out of neutral and into permanent alignment with Serenata’s perspective, the other characters lose their potency as viable sources of objection and enlightenment — and not for Serenata alone. They turn into straw men ... the reader, too, slowly comes unmoored ... The novel is good at establishing the us-versus-them mentality of a long marriage ... Throughout The Motion of the Body Through Space, I was desperate to do one of two things: to extend my sympathies to Serenata, or to watch as Shriver served her up as harshly as Serenata herself would have ... And Shriver’s sympathies, so clearly and uniquely reserved for Serenata, restrain her from real daring ... I kept thinking: Who cares? ... There is a provocative argument running through this unrelentingly didactic book, which posits that extreme sports might be a kind of white sickness ... I found it ironic, and lamentable, that Shriver did not deal as boldly with Serenata as she does with her race.

I found it hard to admire until I got to the last third—and then I was both moved and entertained. But I suspect a lot of readers will not make it that far ... Some of it is painfully funny, a lot of it is exaggerated (Remington’s many near-death experiences), and much of it rings true. The book lacks the subtlety of Shriver’s earlier novels. Very little is left to the reader to figure out. We know what Shriver thinks because she bangs us over the head with it for 300 pages. She also takes time to mock the modern cultural conventions that have been eating away at her for the past few years: the issue of cultural appropriation in the arts; identity politics; the #MeToo movement; even trendy phrases such as bucket list and boomer. Nothing escapes her scorn, and it’s a pity because most of that scorn is unnecessary. Her brutal mocking of the concept of white privilege is certain to appall and infuriate many readers ... I’d like to recommend that you just skip the first 200 pages of Motion and get right to the good parts ... But without the troublesome first part, you wouldn’t know how good it actually becomes.

Shriver has written a satire on fitness zealotry with a side serving of culture-war intrigue ... broad comedy ... On the culture-war front, Shriver’s tone tends towards the didactic ... it takes aim at liberal hypocrisy...but the hyperbole it trades in, however amusing, is unlikely to win converts to [Shriver's] side of the debate. Far more of the novel is devoted to Remington’s quixotic quest to become a machine capable of massive feats of endurance. It’s hard not to share Serenata’s dim view of this project, since Shriver has stacked the deck in her favour, and by the novel’s final third what began as a nimble romp becomes a dutiful slog to a predictable resolution. Along the way, Shriver’s finest writing addresses abstract questions such as the relation of the self and body across time ... poignant insights about ageing are delivered inside a novel that goes down like a sour pill. Shriver’s bitterness is reminiscent of VS Naipaul’s, but his great subjects were postcolonial revolution and the agonies of decolonisation. The stakes of Shriver’s drive-by declinist aphorisms are rather less world-historical than she makes them out to be ... Shriver’s rage against the dying of various lights makes for a diverting spectacle, if not always a coherent novel.

Sitting on the couch reading a slaying satire about exercise fanatics should be as satisfying as a chocolate chip cookie, but Lionel Shriver’s new novel is exhausting. I’ve never felt so worn out by the labor of wincing ... the fitness industry is a fat target for satire. And Shriver brings all her ferocious wit to bear to mock its hucksters and disciples. Readers who have endured condescending pity from well-toned gods and goddesses will initially relish Shriver’s merciless ridicule ... As a character, Serenata is a fascinating and daringly unsympathetic heroine, burdened with the loneliness of her greater insight. But she can also be a hectoring bore. Many pages of the novel are given over to acerbic arguments in which Serenata spars with her husband about his rabid training. She claims the two of them are engaged in Noël Coward-like repartee, but their interactions sound wholly mirthless. This is satire that moves, like Remington, with heavy weights strapped to its legs ... Unfortunately, beneath its parody of fitness fanatics, the plot is premised on whiny canards about the insidious effects of reverse racism ... tremendously disappointing because there’s a rich and sympathetic story here about how aging can disrupt a marriage in strange and surprising ways. Remington’s frantic efforts to run himself back into virility and purpose will resonate with anyone staring at the prospect of a long, useless retirement. And Serenata’s resentment toward her failing knees feels poignant and universal. But this is a novel more determined to make its point than to make us consider the profound mystery of what it means to tend a body for the long haul.

Shriver doesn’t much mind whether we like her...which makes her challenge to the reader—and we are goaded throughout these pages—all the more enjoyable ... Provocative and witty, The Motion of the Body through Space is a 350-page argument with its readers which takes the form of an argument between Serenata and Remington, and between Serenata and herself, in dialogue so poised it could be lifted from page to stage without changing a word. While no author wants their book to appear during a lockdown, the timing of this one could not be better: the need for us all to stop moving for a moment and reflect on where we are is Shriver’s main subject.

The awkward characters, the heavyhanded opining make the book hard to love. There are moments when you can’t believe it has been published ... But just as you’re about to ask for your money back, Shriver, as always, does something cute at the last minute. She has self-awareness...she has humour...and she concludes this tricky novel with an afterword of genuine insight into ageing that is kind and erudite. If ranty, rich white people with stupid names annoy you, steer clear of this one. But if you can tolerate a lot of meanness and chat about knee replacements, and are looking for a new take on how to live well when the body is failing, Shriver could be just the difficult, limping fellow traveller you need.

... a would-be-funny novel were it not so obviously constructed as a platform for Shriver’s ideological positions. All of Shriver’s gripes with the world, about wokeness and political correctness and affirmative action, are in there—tedious long bits relished by the writer but not the reader. In using her characters and circumstances as a launchpad for her invective, Shriver seems to have forgotten a basic rule of fiction writing: the author’s allegiance is to the reader rather than to the authorial self ... Behind the faux-bravado, the feckless provocateur, I would bet, is a very frightened woman, scared of losing her money, her entitlement, and her relevance, a Shriver becoming merely shriveled, unable to deliver the authenticity she claims to craves in others ... As many fans of the Shriver oeuvre like to reminisce, a New York Times review of The Mandibles called her the Cassandra of American Letters. A more apt, more relevant characterization of Lionel Shriver as she exists today would be the Karen of American Letters, a disgruntled literary scold who uses her privilege against others who are seen as threats. She brings the I would like to speak with the manager attitude to the publishing world. Her voice cries out for a return to the days when whiteness was great, its dominance unquestioned.

While there is nothing nuanced in Shriver’s...scathing excoriation of contemporary cultural clichés, from fitness fanaticism to workplace political correctness to religious zealotry, there is something surprisingly tender in Serenata’s vulnerability about the state of her marriage and her looming physical limitations. With verve, vehemence, and moral vigilance, Shriver’s archetypical characters thrum with self-righteous recrimination in this cheeky diatribe on a society determined to go to extremes.

Shriver’s bitter satire of the elite exercise industry...huffs along with sobering reflections on aging ... With Serenata as a mouthpiece, Shriver casts her familiar brand of mordant humor at easy targets, but unlike in the work of Edward St. Aubyn, for instance, the narrator’s meanness serves no apparent purpose, and the razor-sharp observation isn’t balanced by self-implication. The result is underwhelming

What on earth is happening to Lionel Shriver? In novels like The Post-Birthday World, she stood out as a savvy, cleareyed observer of human foibles. Of late, though, her fiction has become increasingly hectoring, determined to call out what she sees as PC groupthink and browbeat her own characters for their gumption deficits. Here, her bugbear is people who cultishly abuse their bodies in the name of good health ... But Shriver’s juiciest target is the woman who cost Remington his job, a simplistically rendered social justice warrior bogeyman: an unqualified 27-year-old Nigerian woman with a gender-studies degree who becomes Remington’s boss and then deliberately works to undermine him as an older white man. Alas, no triathlon can conquer the injustice of it all. There’s a note of intentional satire here: Remington’s goals and Serenata’s judgments are both inflated for effect. But in the process, Shriver has made a cartoon of her talents as a social observer ... Shriver has written some fine novels. Run away from this one.