The first half of So Much For That was incredibly difficult to get through. It felt like there were too many lectures, and too little characterization. The second half moved at a much better clip, but unfortunately this book felt too much like "American Health Insurance for Dummies." Jackson, for the first half of the book, seemed to exist solely as a mouthpiece for the author. Shep and Glynis, who were the heart of the story, seemed murky and distant, much like a picture from a pinhole camera. The prose is wonderful in much of the book, but it is too flawed to recommend. ( )

Shep Knacker no cumplió el sueño de su padre y no fue a la universidad, pero con su talento para los trabajos manuales, para la «chapuza», montó una exitosa empresa de servicios, una superlampistería. Y ha disfrutado con su trabajo, y no le ha ido mal en esta vida, pero desde la adolescencia sueña con la Otra Vida, que no es la muerte, sino retirarse todavía joven a un paraíso tercermundista, donde sus dólares valdrán mucho más y le durarán para siempre, y disfrutará de unas lentas vacaciones sin final, como las de su infancia.
Shep ya tiene el capital necesario para hacer real su sueño: hace pocos años vendió su empresa por un millón de dólares a uno de sus empleados. Ha seguido trabajando para él, pero lo que iban a ser dos o tres meses de permanencia en la empresa por razones fiscales, se han ido prolongando porque Glynis, su esposa, a quien él suponía comprometida con su proyecto, ha ido demorando la partida, primero con la excusa de los hijos, y luego con distintos pretextos que sólo encubren la simple falta de deseo.
Pero ahora Shep ha quemado las naves —o eso cree él— y ha comprado billetes, sólo de ida, para la isla de Pemba, cerca de Madagascar, que es el paraíso que la familia ha elegido tras ir todos los años a explorar tierras exóticas en sus vacaciones. Y como Shep es un buen tipo, muy conciliador, le dice a su mujer que le dará una semana para que se lo piense. Y Glynis le revela entonces que tiene una enfermedad rara y de muy mal pronóstico, un mesotelioma peritoneal, y que él no puede dejar su trabajo porque ella necesita su seguro médico para los tratamientos todavía experimentales que pueden salvarla…

Did you ever wonder what you'd do if you found out you had cancer? For myself, I find I wouldn't want the treatment that seems more horrible than the disease itself.

This is a fiction that is unbearably heartbreaking but, thank goodness, has a lovely ending.
Shep Knacker had a handyman business that he worked so hard at that it was a flourishing success. After 20 years he cashed in and sold it to an employee. After being paid 1 million for his business, Shep put his money into a Merrill Lynch account minus capital gains of $300,000. In the book, each chapter starts out with the diminishing value of his account.

His wife has contracted mesothelioma, because of some asbestos she worked with years ago, in her metalworking business. The lousy health insurance that Shep's former employee (for whom Shep now works) has changed to, to save money, doesn't pay much. Out-of-pocket for each chemotherapy treatment is $40,000. Moreover, the best mesothelioma doctor is out-of-network, so Shep must pay 40% for any of his, and his hospital's services.
Shepherd Knacker starts out with $731,778.56 in his Merrill Lynch account.
P.49:
"shep had the sudden impression that this visit, if not the whole song and dance from the x-rays and the cat-scan to all the scalpels and 'abdominal ports' and vile medications to come, was a farce, a macabre charade. As helpful and soothing as this doctor was trying to be, shep felt distinctly humored. In turn, he also felt co-opted into a collusion with the doctor, whereby together they were humoring his wife. the joke was on Glynis. It was a wicked joke, a despicable joke, for which she would pay with every fiber of her being. He did not want to be a part of it. He would be a part of it."

There are two sub Medical crises going on in the story: both involve Shep's best friend and fellow employee. Jackson is forever harping on his favorite subject: how the government has let us all down.
P.78:
"for government was now, in Jackson's view, a for-profit corporation, although a sort of which the average industrial magnate could only dream: a natural monopoly that could charge whatever it wanted, yet with no obligation to hand over a product of any description in return. A business whose millions of customers had no choice but to buy this mythical product, lest they be locked in a small room with bad food. Since all politicians are by definition 'on the tit,' none of them had any motivation to constrain the size of this marvelous corporation that didn't actually have to make anything. Occasional conservative lip service notwithstanding, sure enough, over the decades USA Inc had done Nothing but expand."

Because Shep has worked hard, certain members of his family see him as an ATM. His sister Beryl, who constantly asks him for"loans" that she never pays back, and indeed, Shep's own wife Glynis the metalworking artist quits working after she marries him. His daughter Amelia has never settled down to a steady job after Shep paid for her expensive education.
P.117:
"he was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200,000 Dartmouth BA in 'media studies' might have been available through a free trial subscription to The Atlantic Monthly and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for $50 a month. His daughter's dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he'd accrued previous to the sale of Knack. Shep may not have expected his own father to send him through school, but it was customary now: a child had a right to a university education. So he should not resent the expense, and therefore he did not resent it. Yet after decades of single-ply, turkey-burgers stinting, actually to be punished for the frugality had been, well - disconcerting. His cash assets had flat out disqualified Amelia from financial aid."

Jackson's daughter Flicka has a rare genetic disorder that is extremely dangerous and high maintenance. In response, his other daughter Heather is jealous of the attention her sister commands, and invents imaginary illnesses.
P.166:
"Christ, she'd been fishing for the designation of learning disability for months. The Cold Truth was that Heather wasn't as bright as her older sister, and maybe having a plain mid-level IQ was a learning disability of a kind. Strange how if you are straight-out dumb it was meant to be obscurely your fault, but with 'ADD' your intellectual shortcomings became blamelessly medical. It didn't really make much sense for the 'learning disabled' to be given an unlimited amount of time to complete standardized tests, while the hopelessly stupid kids still had to finish by the Bell, when both camps were victims of genetics. Hell, it was flat-out dumb kids who should get the extra time, since they'd yet to invent a drug to make you clever."

Jackson's wife Carol is beautiful, and Jackson has always felt that he not quite measures up to her. We don't find out till later, but Jackson gets penis enlargement surgery from a quack, with disastrous results.
P.180-1:
"The experiment had failed. He may never have quite fathomed why women would find a penis attractive – with a shriveled, too-thin- skin, the blobby, drooping testicles with straggles of hair, the little mushroom cap at the end somehow not a form that human flesh should assume. at rest it looked frightened and depressed; when alert, impertinent yet insecure, waving about and trying to attract attention like a loud mouth acting out. He'd never entirely trusted Carol's enthusiasm for the thing; her natural kindness made her unreliable. Yet there were limits to Carol's altruism, since she was currently making no effort to disguise her revulsion, as there were also limits to his own disaffection with the phallus of conventional proportions. The unimproved version had still been preferable to this.
"The lumpy tuber between his legs now looked like one of those balloon animals that children's entertainers twisted hastily together at birthday parties. Where before the shaft was thicker at the base, now it was narrowest there, for the collagen used For thickening had slurped downward, bulging over the rim to partially bury the head. His dick had love handles. The filler tissue had migrated asymmetrically, too, and the bulge was larger on the right. Overwhelmed by what now hung more like a third testicle, the head appeared smaller and pokier, no better than a gumdrop. And the shaft emerged from too low down. The snipping of the suspensory ligaments were supposed to have released a whole inch of length otherwise wastefully tucked inside his pelvis; now his prick seemed to be growing out of the balls themselves. The descendant derivation Jarred the eye, like a dirty scroll on a men's room wall by a kid who couldn't draw. Inflamed, bloated, and seeping, this was the kind of fatally festering extremity that battlefield medics in the civil war sawed-off on the spot."

Glynis is describing a chemotherapy session to Flicka, and I'm not sure if the author didn't plagiarize one of the Star Trek movies where Dr McCoy goes into a dialysis center in the past, and raves at how diabetes is being treated.
P.331:
" 'anyway, there's one episode, something about a planet that's done away with war by having scores of people on both sides of a ceasefire volunteer on a regular schedule to walk into a chamber and be euthanized. It's all very orderly; you know, that program loved alluding to the Nazis. And then Captain Kirk comes in and messes up their thing, giving one of his breathy, emphatic speeches about how they either have to go back to killing each other the old-fashioned way or make peace. So every time I go to Columbia-Presbyterian I picture Captain Kirk bursting into the oncology wing and getting a load of all these delusional Lemmings on Planet Bonker mainlining strychnine. I see him getting self-righteously horrified, and yanking the needles out in a frenzy. Delivering a strident, self-righteous speech about how barbaric it is, how you don't cure disease with poison. because the whole routine is completely sick. I really do think that years from now people will look back on chemotherapy the way we look back now on bloodletting and leeches.' "

This was so good, that I'll be reading more from this author. ( )

I was a little disappointed by this book. After reading "We Need to Talk About Kevin," I went on a Shriver kick and currently have a pile of nearly every book that she has written (or at least, every book that I was able to get from the library).

I really liked the premise of this novel, and the exploration that she wrote regarding the price of a life, the cost of health insurance and health care, and infrastructure and social constructs that exist around terminal illness and end-of-life care. There is a dialogue where the dying woman's husband asks the doctor how much time they have bought her and how much money they spent; the doctor replies that they bought her a good three months, and the husband replies, no, they were not a good three months. Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one after extensive medical treatment will understand that.

I tend to enjoy Shriver's descriptive and lengthy prose, but in this particular novel it seemed overwrought. Although the rants of one character raised interesting points and brought issues to the forefront that were important to the plot, it became a little tedious (which may have been the effect she was going for after all). Topically, this was a great story, but the overall effect was less than I expected from a Shriver novel. ( )

Af en toe een knap fragment, een pittige persoonsbeschrijving. Te middle-class Amerikaans langdradig en vooral té deprimerend om verder te lezen.