Sick Jokes

So Much for That and Model Home stitch together comedy and catastrophe.

Books discussed in this essay:

So Much for That, by Lionel Shriver. Harper Collins, 2010.

Model Home, by Eric Puchner. Scribner, 2010.

Spoiler Alert: This essay reveals the ending of So Much for That.

CAUTION: Unsupervised use of these novels individually or in combination may result in the following side effects: acute anxiety, periodic wincing, and generalized depression. I feel it my professional responsibility as a reviewer to advise anyone undertaking to read either of the works under consideration here to be prepared: you are about to enter a world of hurt. Or more precisely, a world of terminal illness and atrocious physical injury and suffering, all presented in excruciatingly thorough detail. Which is not to say the journey will not be a powerful, moving, and frequently very funny one. But if you share the imaginative sensibility of Samuel Johnson, who declared King Lear so unendurably painful that he could not bring himself to reread it – well, you have been warned.

Lionel Shriver appears to have an attraction to families suffering from pathology-induced trauma. Her Orange Prize winning novel of 2003, We Have to Talk about Kevin, deals with a mother's attempt to come to terms with her sociopathic son who commits a school massacre. The subject of So Much for That is the effect of a more physical disease. And indeed, what could be more timely than a tragedy that has less to do with the disfavour of the Gods or the unfathomable mystery of existence than the inadequacy of private health insurance coverage. The recent passage of Obamacare may have put an end to that particular source of terror and pity, but Shepherd Knacker's wife gets sick a little too early.

As the novel begins, Shep is preparing to carry out a plan that has given meaning to his life for the last 30 years – he will quit his job, cash in the savings he and his wife Glynis have accumulated by relentless scrimping and saving, and move the family to Pemba, a small island off the coast of Africa where his money, at Third World prices, will support a retirement in a low-rent Eden.

But Glynis puts her husband's project on life support when she announces that she has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, meaning that Shep will need to keep the job he has come to despise for the sake of his insurance. Shep's fantasy of a relocation to paradise is replaced by the reality of a journey into emotional hell as he watches his once beautiful wife suffer the ravages of her disease and falls into financial ruin as he struggles to cover the unsupportable deductibles on Glynis's ever more experimental – i.e. expensive – treatments.

In refusing to spare the reader any depressing detail as Glynis slides towards her inevitable end, Shriver is offering a direct affront to American sensibilities. Americans, notoriously, don't do death. This is not the result of any constitutional squeamishness so much as a profound conviction that it is optional. The nation was, after all, founded by a group who expected the end of the world in their lifetimes and the idea has never really gone away.

Shriver, however, makes us watch the whole queasy spectacle of somatic decay, from the recurrent nosebleeds to the repeated and excruciating chemo treatments to the incessant infections. This is painful; more painful is the cruel lesson taught by incurable illness, that death is even more pointless than life, and all formulas of consolation or encouragement are empty. Glynis ultimately comes to the bitter conclusion that, "There is only the body.... Wellness is escape from the body. But there is no escape. So wellness is delay," while Shep, his bank account gutted, finally explodes against the jargon of hope: "The battle against cancer. The arsenal at our disposal ... you make her think that there's something she has to do, to be a good soldier, a trooper. So if she deteriorates anyway, then there' s something she didn't do: she didn't show courage under fire."

This is a tough, mostly honest novel. That fact makes the end all the more disappointing. It seems like a cheat. No sooner has Shep dismissed his wife's oncologist than he receives word that the company Glynis had been suing for causing her condition has decided to settle for over a million dollars. This windfall ex machina allows Shep to convince Glynis to decamp to Pemba after all, along with Carol, the beautiful and recently widowed wife of Shep's best friend. After Glynis's death a few months later, Carol offers herself as a replacement, breaking the ice with, "Do you by any chance have a really, really big dick?" However happy a consummation this may be for Shep, it is a sad one for the novel, and the reader who has passed the ordeal of the earlier chapters may feel tricked by this suddenly simple and cloudless conclusion.

Model Home is Eric Puchner's first novel, and it shows loads of talent. It’s the story of the Zillers, a sitcom perfect family living in an affluent gated community in Southern California in the 1980s. Warren is a successful real estate developer; Camille, his wife, is motherly and has a "Commit Random Acts of Kindness" sticker on her bumper; Dustin, the eldest is preparing to enter UCLA in the fall; bookish Lyle worries about her inability to get a Southern California tan; 11-year-old Jonas is quirky and intense, dresses in different shades of orange, and wonders about things like whether it would be worse to be eaten by sharks or picked apart by vultures. What could possibly go wrong?

No points for this one. It turns out that Warren has sunk all the family’s money into a residential development that happens to be next door to a planned toxic dump. Camille loses her job as a producer of school documentaries (Earth to My Body: What's Happening) and leaves Warren, and worst of all, the family returns from a weekend in the desert to find that someone has left the gas stove on. Dustin lights a cigarette, triggering an explosion and causing hideous damage to his face and torso. Like Shriver, Puchner dares us to watch: "The stench was unspeakable. After washing his arm with sterile water, the nurse moistened a gauzy sponge and began to debride him, scrubbing his arm to loosen the skin ... occasionally reaching down and picking some dead skin off with her fingers or using a scissors to snip it free before tossing everything – skin and sponge – into the hamper."

Still, as awful as things get, there's still room for comedy here. The family might be a slightly older version of the Gladney's in Don DeLillo's White Noise, which combines comedy and catastrophe in a similar fashion. The situation is critical without ever becoming quite serious. Part of this is due to the pleasure one takes in Puchner's offbeat perceptions, like his description of a miniature golf course by the side of an interstate: "a sprawl of frosting green fairways crowned by waterfalls and windmills and a rainbow-colored dragon with smoke pluming out of its mouth. It looked like what a freeway might dream of eating for dessert." No one gets a tropical island or a more buxom wife at the end, but this novel reminds you that, whatever you really want, it's probably not that anyway.