So Much for That - Large Print by Lionel Shriver (Paperback)

About the Book

"Shriver has a gift for creating real and complicated characters... A highly engrossing novel." -- San Francisco Chronicle

From New York Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver (The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin), comes a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family's struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America.

Book Synopsis

"Shriver has a gift for creating real and complicated characters... A highly engrossing novel." -- San Francisco Chronicle

From New York Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver (The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin), comes a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family's struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America.

From the Back Cover

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?

Review Quotes

"A delicious novel. . . . So Much for That, Lionel Shriver's improbably feel-good black comedy, is the rare book that can make suicide, near-bankruptcy and terminal cancer so engaging you can't wait to turn the page. . . . Provocative, entertaining-and so very timely." - Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
"[A] shrewd, ambitious novel. . . . Shriver's prose is frank and often beautiful . . . nuanced and persuasive." - The New Yorker
"With her new novel, So Much for That, Lionel Shriver strengthens her already credible claim to the title of best living American writer. . . . Her work offers an appealing combination of qualities that seldom come together in a single writer. She couples the hardheaded social observation of Edith Wharton or George Eliot with a relentless psychological and artistic boldness that belongs more to the tradition of Melville or Dostoevsky. Exerting these different skills with immense confidence and penetration, Shriver is one of our great American originals." - Kevin Frazier, The Millions
"[Shriver] certainly has her finger on national nerves." - Birmingham Post
"A visceral and deeply affecting story, a story about how illness affects people's relationships, and how their efforts to grapple with mortality reshape the arcs of their lives. . . . [Shriver's] understanding of her people is so intimate, so unsentimental . . . it lofts these characters permanently into the reader's imagination." - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Harrowing yet riveting.... Wisely, Shriver doesn't make her characters all saints.... [They] come alive with visceral abandon.... Clever, convincing...stubbornly real-and chillingly personal." - Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune
"Artists like Lionel Shriver have the ability to illuminate mere events and bring them to life. Her books get under your skin because they're so very grounded in the real world. . . . Art, like life, doesn't always cut us the breaks we desire. If we're lucky-and in the capable hands of a writer like Shriver-we emerge all the wiser for it. And don't let the weighty subject matter scare you off: the spot-on, often hilarious characterizations kept me reading hungrily until the very end." - Shannon Rhoades, NPR's "Morning Edition"
"The rare novel that will shake and change you. With these wholly realistic and sympathetic characters, [Shriver] makes us consider the most existential questions of our lives and the dreadful calculus of modern health care in this country.... It's a bitter pill, indeed, but take it if you can." - Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Shriver writes in precise, dynamic prose.... If anyone's going to perk up the often-limp niceness of the women's novel it's Shriver, who has no use for earth mothers or noble victims.... The climax offers more fun, vengeful satisfaction and pure tenderness than any treatise on the future of healthcare." - Ella Taylor, Los Angeles Times
"Cauterizingly funny." - Vogue
"Neither stingy with subplots nor shy about taking on timely, complex issues, [Shriver] tosses plenty of both into the pot with real daring and brio." - Leah Hager Cohen, New York Times Book Review
"A visceral and deeply affecting story, a story about how illness affects people's relationships, and how their efforts to grapple with mortality reshape the arcs of their lives.... [Shriver's] understanding of her people is so intimate, so unsentimental...it lofts these characters permanently into the reader's imagination." - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"[An] immaculate, hilarious, and authentically dark new novel. . . . A cast of characters as absurd and entertaining as they are real." - Cathi Hanauer, Elle
"As fascinating as it is disturbing." - Cleveland Plain Dealer