Lionel Shriver is nervous. She’s just heard back from her first-choice audiobook narrator for her new novel, A Better Life. “How did he put it?” she says via Zoom from her new home near Lisbon, Portugal. “He was ‘uncomfortable with the material.’ ”
Though Shriver designed the book “to challenge,” she knows America has changed since her first novel, The Female of the Species, was published back when Ronald Reagan was president. To paraphrase, she says most fiction writers are left of center, so left-wing readers have become spoiled by having their opinions confirmed; most novels about immigrants chronicle the immigrants’ experience rather than the native population’s; because readers sympathize with the underdog, it makes better narrative sense; and it appeals more to America’s sense of itself, a melting pot and all that. Therefore, Shriver notes, “readers tend to get only one side of the story.”
A Better Life, out from Harper in February, tells the other side. Shriver says she likes to write books that “fill a gap” in the current cultural discourse—and the more challenging the task the more interested she becomes. In Abominations (2022), she wrote that she relishes “supporting points of view that are under-expressed, unpopular, or downright dangerous.” She anticipates that this novel will likely “offend the usual suspects” but also hopes it might “gratify a large number of readers who never have their opinions on this issue catered to.” She later adds, “I feel a funny responsibility to carry the can for the ‘not far left’ in literature. There aren’t many of us out there. But I believe the appetite in the readership is out there. And not far left is wholly distinct from far right.”
In A Better Life, it’s June 2023 and migrants have overwhelmed New York City’s processing system. Out in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, 26-year-old Nico Bonaventura lives “suspended, without a care” with his mother, Gloria, in the spacious Victorian she got in her divorce. A classic Shriver do-gooder, Gloria knits cashmere “packers” for trans children’s underpants and volunteers for progressive causes, while Nico binges internet porn and right-wing media. Knowing how his take on migrants would land with self-righteous Mom, he only shares it with sympathetic Dad, now an “anti-woke” journalist whose rightward drift helped end the marriage. When Gloria applies to house a migrant at home, Nico finally speaks up, only to have his concerns dismissed as selfish.
Immigration has long fascinated Shriver. “It’s morally compelling,” she says, “and so complex.” She began writing A Better Life in 2023, as nearly 3,000 migrants were arriving every week in New York City, building a domestic drama from the situation and infusing the novel with the debate surrounding it. Making the characters’ conversations contribute to the larger questions being raised “necessitated including some extremes,” Shriver says, in response to a question about her use of incendiary language that would not be out of place at a white nationalist rally.
“When you were dealing with literally millions of people coming in per year, do you think only white supremacists in the privacy of their kitchens used the word invasion?” Shriver asks. “It’s also language that more centrist Americans use behind closed doors, which isn’t as pristine or careful.” She also says she subscribes to the “endangered” and “old-fashioned view that when characters talk in a novel, they do not necessarily represent the author’s point of view.”
Shriver, 68, grew up in North Carolina in “a family and a larger social milieu that were heavily infected with self-righteousness,” she says. Her father, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School who took part in the civil rights march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, was a president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary; her mother was an executive in the National Council of Churches. Young Shriver, a self-described tomboy and weirdo, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard before getting an MFA from Columbia, where she scored an agent and wrote her first novel. It didn’t sell, but the next one did. After that, she left the U.S., with stints in Kenya, Thailand, and Israel before settling first in Belfast and then London.
Shriver often courts controversy with her op-eds and outfits (infamously donning a sombrero during a discussion about cultural appropriation) and, increasingly, with her fiction. Her previous novel, Mania, took on cancel culture with an alternate America that outlaws calling someone stupid. Before the Trump era, Shriver was best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin, an unnerving tale of a mother examining her role in the murders her son commits. It was Shriver’s seventh novel and her first commercial success, a sleeper hit that became an international bestseller, won the Orange Prize, and was adapted into an acclaimed film. But type “Is Lionel Shriver...” into a search engine and the internet supplies “right wing,” “conservative,” and “a Trump supporter.”
Shriver doesn’t fit easily into a single silo. As an expat journalist, she contributes to outlets left and right. Her 2010 novel So Much for That, shortlisted for the National Book Award, criticized America’s for-profit healthcare system. She’s been called racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, and, in her own words, “evil incarnate.”
A Better Life will likely add a few words to that list. When ebullient Martine, an immigrant from Honduras, moves into Gloria’s house, she adopts the role of appreciative servant. Gloria and her daughters embrace Martine and dismiss Nico’s concerns about a “carefully crafted” asylum narrative. But soon Martine introduces a menacing stranger as her brother, Domingo, and before you can say “mi casa, su casa,” he’s moved in too, and stubborn Gloria refuses to acknowledge a downside. Then Domingo’s entitled “business partner” becomes a permanent resident, running shady hustles from the kitchen. Unlike sweet Martine, the men treat the house like they own it, and it’s the Bonaventuras who start feeling like unwanted guests. This is merely the beginning, as Shriver wickedly flips the script to illustrate how one family’s worst nightmare might just be another’s American dream.
Shriver says her husband thinks most people don’t understand that she’s “actually nice.” What else do people not know? She considers for a moment. “I put a high premium on a sense of humor. I like to treat people well. I’m agreeable in social circumstances. I don’t court arguments. I’m friendly with salespeople. I like to cook and entertain. I actively try to be good company. I want my presence to improve, rather than diminish, someone’s day. That extends to books, by the way. When you’re writing, you’re trying to be good company. I never forget this is entertainment.”
It could be argued that Shriver has been a writer since age seven, when her essay on the cafeteria renovation at her school won her a box of cookies and a chef’s hat she wore “proudly” to lunch. “I decided writing was lucrative,” she says. Still, a lot has changed since 1964. “Television cannibalizes fiction for ideas,” she explains. Rather than “anchoring the culture,” the novel today is “primarily a route to a Netflix series.”
Be that as it may, she’s already thinking about her next one. And she credits HarperCollins, her longtime publisher, for keeping the faith and never forcing a sensitivity read on her. “If you give this book a sensitivity read,” Shriver says, “there’s nothing left.” That doesn’t mean she wasn’t pushed for changes. She pushed back. A Better Life is, therefore, the book she wanted to publish. “So on my head be it,” she adds.
Shriver takes in the view of the Atlantic through a window in her office. “We were talking about what reaction I anticipate with this book,” she says. “It’s rational to be fearful that it will be widely assaulted.” She pauses, eyes on the horizon. “But what I should be afraid of is that it’s ignored.” If history can teach us anything, it’s that the last thing Lionel Shriver will be is ignored.
Mike Harvkey is the author of In the Course of Human Events and was a researcher-reporter for the true crime book All-American Murder.
