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So Much for That: A Novel - Lionel Shriver
So Much for That: A Novel
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3.06 90
From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World comes a searing, ruthlessly honest new novel about a marriage both stressed and strengthened by the demands of serious illness. Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retreat to the Third... show more
From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World comes a searing, ruthlessly honest new novel about a marriage both stressed and strengthened by the demands of serious illness. Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retreat to the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with "talking, thinking, seeing, and being"—and enough sleep. When he sells his home repair business for a cool million dollars, his dream finally seems within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years, has concocted endless excuses why it's never the right time to go. Weary of working as a peon for the jerk who bought his company, Shep announces he's leaving for a Tanzanian island, with or without her. Just returned from a doctor's appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep can't go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. But their policy only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep's nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain. Enriched with three medical subplots that also explore the human costs of American health care, So Much for That follows the profound transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor. In defiance of her dark subject matter, Shriver writes a page-turner that presses the question: How much is one life worth?
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Format: hardcover
ISBN: 9780061458583 (0061458589)
ASIN: 0061458589
Publisher: Harper
Pages no: 448
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Books I have read and loved
Books I have read and loved rated it
3.0
So Much For That lacks all the force of So Much for Kevin. My copy has an article at the very end (by Shriver) that is a condensed version of the book, which I wish I had either read instead, or not read at all. An old friend of Shriver, Terri had mesothelioma, and clearly Shriver regrets having be...
jbradway
jbradway rated it
1.0 So Much for That: A Novel
I didn't earn the right to claim that this book is horrible. I did earn the right to say that the first third is, though. I can't go on.Except for Shep, the characters in this novel are loathsome, nasty people. Glynis, Shep's wife and cancer patient, is weaponized, revealing her disease to friends a...
popsiclesinbed
popsiclesinbed rated it
What's amazing about Lionel Shriver is that she never shrinks from expressing the meanest things we think about our friends, family, and selves but at the same time can have such sympathetic, even lovable, characters.
Bettie's Books
Bettie's Books rated it
1.0
blurb - A dramatisation of Lionel Shriver's unflinching new novel which portrays the economic and emotional fall-out of serious illness. Shep Knacker has been saving all his working life for 'the Afterlife' - his retirement escape route from Brooklyn to a remote island off the coast of Zanzibar. But...
auntieannie
auntieannie rated it
5.0 So Much for That: A Novel
Loved it."Accompanied by a strumming guitar and uplifting flute cadenzas that in his boyhoodd typified alternative folk services in his father's church, these warnings were delivered with a lilting, lobotomized pleasantness -- the tone of voice in which one might read bedtime stories to small childr...
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