Serenata wonders what might have provoked her husband of 33 years to challenge himself in such a grueling and uncharacteristic way. What follows is largely an account of how their joint prediction proves true. “You’re going to be a real bitch about this, aren’t you?” Remington asks. But a marathoner? She asks Remington if he’s aware that his ambition is “hopelessly trite.” Actually, a serial killer Serenata might respect. When Remington Alabaster (his outlandish name itself a kind of poke in the eye of the faint reader) announces his intention, after a lifetime of inertia, to run a marathon at the age of 64, his wife, Serenata Terpsichore (a still bolder poke), flies at him as if he had announced plans to perfect the art of human sacrifice. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds. Her 15th novel, “The Motion of the Body Through Space,” is certainly no wilting lily. In her public remarks, she has not shied from controversy. In novels like “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “The Mandibles,” Shriver mocks dogmas and punctures myths. 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. If most contemporary novelists are preoccupied with redemption, and if this leaves fiction open to accusations of being, in the main, one big sop to human vanity, well, that’s why the likes of McCarthy and Moshfegh are so refreshing. Think of the dark filament connecting Cormac McCarthy’s early work to Ottessa Moshfegh’s. It is the rare writer who forswears this paradigm through pessimism or scruple. This paradigm shines a light on our most delicate and aspirational selves - because who hasn’t felt misunderstood, even damnable, as characters in fiction so often feel, while still yearning for sympathy and a happy ending? THE MOTION OF THE BODY THROUGH SPACE By Lionel ShriverĬall it the pity paradigm: A novel can be judged a success if it generates the right amount of sympathy for a character, no matter how flawed, hopeless or confused that character might be.

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