With its cleverly assembled cast of the angry and the mild, the liberal and the anti-establishment, this book sets the stage for some spectacular ranting. While the subject matter – the US health system and welfare/tax in general – was interesting to me as a non US-reader, it felt at times that the ranting was going to swamp the plot, with the characters no more than mouthpieces for an angry author.But if I was tempted to chuck the whole lot in as a bad job around the time of the extended exam questions rant, I was won over by the halfway point, and as usual the author’s brilliantly perceptive writing took over and made the book unputdownable.It was often the throwaway lines that made me smile the most - of a sleepover, it is noted that “Zach was spending the night in another boy’s rank, cable-strewn bedroom” (brilliant, just brilliant, it makes me smile every time I think about it).Whatever my doubts about the ending (something a bit too convenient about it perhaps?) it does leave you with a nice warm feeling, and in line with what one reviewer on the cover says, it did make me love the NHS even more than I did before. As (bad) luck would have it, while I was reading this book a close family member had cause to call a doctor out late at night on a weekend, and be rushed to hospital for tests. I was so enmeshed in the story that it had me panicking about the sort of bills that would head our way, and it was with genuine relief that I realised there would be none.OK, and a small matter – was it just me, or was the choice of name for the central character disconcertingly sniggerworthy? It was ages before ‘Shep Knacker’ sounded anything other than bizarre, and then there would come a reference to “the Knackers” and that would be it. Despite the author pointing out the ‘knacker’s yard’ connection, it probably does me no credit that in my case it was always another image that sprung to mind. I'm usually a bit leery of Lionel Shriver. her journalism often strikes a harsher note than I want to deal with but boy, her inner steel is a constant joy in this novel. Joy may seem an unlikely reaction to a story about characters' suffering : cancer, chronic life-threatening genetic illness in childhood, the results of bothced cosmetic surgery, they're all here. But the passion both Shriver and her characters bring to that story and to the indictment of healthcare insurance and costs in the US make this novel spit sparks.
Do You like book So Much For That (2010)?
Sadly, unless you are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, one can not get sick.
—Eliot
