JUST WHAT IS A LIFE WORTH IN D

SO MUCH FOR THAT by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins, Pounds 15) LIONEL Shriver's new novel is packed with grievances and bursting with bile. The anger is directed primarily at the injustices of the US healthcare system but her characters are jaded with much of American life. Yet despite its polemical tone, So Much For That is an inspiring and -- eventually -- uplifting read.

Its protagonist is Shep Knacker, a hard-working everyman who has sold his handyman business to pay for his Great Escape. For years, Shep has been dreaming about what he calls "The Afterlife": retiring to a remote island. Now the bags are packed, the plane tickets are bought, all he has left to do is give his wife Glynis an ultimatum: come with him or watch him leave.

But Glynis has a bombshell of her own: she has a rare, virulent form of cancer. She tells Shep coolly: "I'm afraid I will need your health insurance", taking with it his hope of an exit. Even with insurance, however, Rado Watches the cost of Glynis's treatment drains Shep's Afterlife fund.

Meanwhile, his best friend, Jackson, is dealing with wholesale lingerie his own medical misfortunes. His disabled daughter, Flicka, suffers from a degenerative condition; her life is "an eternal trial". Jackson has his own self-inflicted injury too, the result of botched elective surgery. He faces both embarrassment and bills as he tries to fix the damage.

Shriver's main subject is this entwining of health and wealth, or, as Shep's father puts it bluntly, "what a life is worth, in dollars". In fact, the two become so closely linked that economic vocabulary slips into Shep's thoughts on morbidity (he believes that Glynis is "owed" an "astronomical debt" because of her illness) and he chooses medical language to express their financial problems: they are "haemorrhaging" cash.

The characters are compelling, if hard to like. Glynis is a prickly misanthrope who takes sadistic pleasure in others' misfortunes, while Jackson is one of the world's great complainers, whose lengthy diatribes occasionally become wearing.

But this is a rare complaint. The story moves swiftly and Shriver's love of language is always evident. She is a great polemicist too, casting her cynical gaze both at society's great ills and at middleclass America's petty sins.

Omega Watches

In a well-drawn cast of lesser characters, many feel familiar. Shep's sister is a liberal film-maker who takes his cash while denouncing him as a sell-out, his boss a brainless bully. But these portrayals don't feel hackneyed, and Shriver shuns the most obvious cliche of all. Far from making Flicka an uncomplaining angel, she is a grouchy teen who tells her parents that she would rather be dead.

Shriver does not flinch from the unpleasant details of disease either, embracing the scatological. This bluntness contrasts with most characters' failure to stomach sickness: Glynis's friends desert her; only Shep is unswervingly supportive.

Terminal illness is just too bleak, it seems, for many of us to handle. The double achievement in So Much For That, then, is that it forces the reader to confront disease and deterioration, and yet it is a novel that is both lively and that ends brightly.

Shriver casts her cynical gaze both at society's great ills and at middle-class America's petty sins

Click below links the show anothe one
http://chud.com/community/index.php/public/blog/view/id_18889/
http://watches2010.blog.bokee.net/bloggermodule/blog_viewblog.do?id=5037541