In a speech delivered at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September 2016, Lionel Shriver confessed to being “much more anxious about depicting characters of different races” than she used to be. Even accents, she said, “make me nervous.” When starting out as a writer, Shriver had scarcely hesitated to draw African-American characters in her fiction or to conjure the sound of “black dialects, for which, having grown up in the American South, I had a pretty good ear.” Her first novel, The Female of the Species (1987), contains not only rounded and recognizable black characters, such as Leonia Harris of the South Bronx—“Out there on the street Ray Harris get treated no better than a wad of gum stuck on somebody shoe”—but also an obscure Kenyan tribe of her own invention, Il-Ororen.
In the decades since, the law of trespass governing literary territory has become noticeably less liberal, but Shriver remains resolute in the conviction that she is as entitled to describe the speech, look, and attitudes of fellow creatures of whatever race or class as anybody else is to describe her. “All boundaries between cultures are fluid,” she told me recently. “We are living in a big hash. It’s fun . . . and interesting . . . and it’s complicated.” In her pacing, and not least in her impressive articulacy, Shriver sometimes talks as if addressing a lecture room. As it happens, she has done so on this topic, “cultural appropriation,” more than once. Her thoughts emerge in clear outlines. “But the solution is not to place a fence around everybody. We are putting together a version of the world that is false: Not only do you not own your culture, whose boundaries you are therefore not allowed to police, but you don’t even own your self. Which is to say, you are unavoidably a part of other people’s lives.”
At the Brisbane event, Shriver recounted one of the pettiest examples of this thoroughly modern offense-taking: the prosecution by university authorities of a group of students at Bowdoin College in Maine for organizing a Mexican-themed party. “The hosts,” she noted, “provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror—numerous partygoers wore.” Some were placed on probation. The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with those adversely affected by the antics of their fellow students. Safe spaces were marked out. Shriver wound up her talk by placing a sombrero on her head.
Her defense of the right to dress up provoked a response from a Sudanese-Australian woman, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, known for video broadcasts with titles such as “What Does My Headscarf Mean to You?” and for her advocacy of sharia law (“it’s about mercy, it’s about kindness”). Abdel-Magied heard Shriver’s speech as a privileged Western woman “mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories.” Her reaction was published by the Guardian: “I breathed in deeply, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. . . . I was reminded of my ‘place’ in the world.”
How to be serious in a time of absurdity? Shriver is not untouched by this and other incidents that have led to a flurry of accusations, including that of “racist provocateur.” The medium for that particular message was Twitter, and the messenger was pseudonymous. In March, in one of her regular columns in the London Spectator, Shriver wrote, “Try this exercise: prove you’re not a racist. . . . The more you go on about your laudable color-blindness, the dodgier you’ll sound.”
While not lacking in confidence, she nonetheless admits that the public criticism has nibbled deleteriously at her sense of duty as a novelist and led to inner confusion on the question of self-censorship. “She has become embattled over the years,” says Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator. Nelson invited her to step in last year when a previous columnist left. “It was a moonshot name on our list. I was delighted when she accepted.” He cannot think of any other contemporary novelist who could fulfill the role of pugnacious columnist, jabbing at liberal pieties, as successfully as she does. “She is very topical. Her latest novel, The Mandibles, for example, tackles issues like cryptocurrency and has an astonishing grasp of economics. It’s also hilarious. In addition to her intellectual qualities, she brought to the Spectator an elegance of expression.”
Nelson reaches for the pleasing phrase “a gentle fearlessness” to describe Shriver’s public stances, but she herself occasionally wonders if she ought to be watching her step. Will her career as a novelist suffer if she steps across one newly drawn line too many? “Unless I push back against my own prudence,” she wrote in an essay on the subject of cultural appropriation in the British magazine Prospect in March, “my fictional worlds will fail to reflect the world I live in. My literary palate will pale.” Shriver’s editor in New York, Gail Winston of HarperCollins, admires her for holding her ground. “We are mired in a historical moment that is obsessed with cultural appropriation, microaggressions, safe spaces—for better and for worse—so anyone who takes a firm position on these matters leaves themselves open to criticism. Lionel has to stay true to herself.”
Rising to the call to do what she believes she does best, Shriver wrote a story called “Domestic Terrorism” in 2016. The locale is Atlanta. The cast includes Harriet, “on the threshold of sixty,” her “socially awkward” son Liam, and Liam’s African-American girlfriend Jocanda, one of Shriver’s many skillfully drawn youthful creations. Jocanda has “mighty powers,” not only in Liam’s bedroom but even while reclining on Harriet’s sofa, “eyeing her hostess through the roseate glow of her Negroni—a cocktail whose name made Harriet anxious.”
It is a comic touch in keeping with the tone of the story, which is transmitted through Harriet’s concerned and caring mind. To any goodwilled reader, it is evident that the author feels as attached to Jocanda as Harriet does. But goodwill is the primary instinct of fewer readers than was once the case. When Shriver sent “Domestic Terrorism” to her agent, with the aim of having it submitted to a magazine “that had published me in the past,” the response she got was that “maybe I’d like to make Jocanda white.” It is the kind of literary advice last heard by authors in the 1950s, when James Baldwin was earnestly advised by his New York publisher to make the gay hero of Giovanni’s Room a woman.
Seated in the kitchen of her tidy house on a busy street in a not yet up-and-coming quarter of South London, Shriver is defensive of a position that has only recently seemed in need of being defended in liberal Western countries: what Gail Winston calls “the right of authors to create the characters they believe best serve the story.” Shriver insists that she acted on good artistic instinct in making Jocanda who she is. “First, it’s Atlanta, which has a very large black population—also a large middle- and upper-middle-class population. It’s perhaps the biggest wealthy black community in the country. So I liked that flipping of economic conventions. She’s from a better part of town than the main character. I know now that any ethnic characters I use are going to be hyperexamined for sins. And people who are looking for sins always find them. It doesn’t matter how innocuous that character is, the very existence of him or her will attract criticism.”
The story was declined by the magazine in which Shriver had hoped to see it published. “We’ll never know,” her agent concluded. “Domestic Terrorism” is, however, included in Property, the new collection of her shorter fiction. A reviewer in the Financial Times, Luke Brown, echoed the anxious opinion of her agent. He depicted Shriver as an author who has “not had an easy time over the past two years” for insisting on being “allowed to represent the lives of those from different races and backgrounds from her own.” Shriver herself feels she’s been having a hard time, but any rapport between author and reviewer ended there. Brown singled out “Domestic Terrorism” as an example of Shriver “spoiling for a fight,” blundering into caricatures and “lapses in taste,” determined to assert “her right to write black characters.” To which Shriver, blending weariness and irritation, responds: “I can either hide in a lily-white past or I can be defiant.”
Margaret Ann Shriver was born—in 1957 in Gastonia, North Carolina—under a defiant star. Her father, Donald, is a Presbyterian minister who later became president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and her mother, Peggy, worked for the National Council of Churches. “I’m afraid all this church created an allergic reaction,” Shriver says. “Now I can’t stand church.” Nevertheless, she describes herself as “classically Protestant . . . hardworking, self-righteous, and cheap”—by which she means “frugal,” a word she reaches for more than once. Shriver doesn’t own a car, preferring to walk or cycle to reach most places in London. She rifles through the clothes racks in thrift shops. The idea of home improvements fails to move her. “The thought of looking it all up online and then choosing. . . . And the disruption!” A night owl, she works till dawn and declines friendly lunches. “It breaks up the working day. Anyway, in my case it’s more like breakfast.” In “My Old Man,” a mostly affectionate portrait of her father written a decade ago (both parents are still alive), Shriver admitted that for him, as for her, “compliments have a shelf life of five seconds, but criticisms fester.”
Her father wanted her to study nursing, a suggestion she sees as emanating from old-style patriarchal parenting. “I was suited [for it] by neither temperament nor inclination, only by dint of being female,” she wrote. In a tomboyish twist, she changed her name to Lionel at the age of 15. Not even her father calls her Margaret now. In the article, she described him as having a face “drawn along strong, square Kennedy lines,” and her face is similarly strong, occasionally tilting towards strictness. Her father could boast a “tawny, leonine thatch” and so can Lionel, drawn into a long ponytail. When she smiles, as she often does with a touch of drollery, everything lightens. “She’s a force,” Gail Winston says. “Anyone meeting her for the first time is struck by her blunt honesty and arresting opinions. An encounter with Lionel, in person or on the page, is stimulating.”
Donald Shriver has written books on religious topics, in some cases mixed with current events: An Ethic for Enemies, one of his incursions into civil rights, bears the subtitle “Forgiveness in Politics.” Another is The Unsilent South. Peggy Shriver’s publications have included Pinches of Salt: Spiritual Seasonings, a collection of poems written to show that “grace can be found in daily life.”
Growing up in a house already occupied by authors, Margaret-turned-Lionel was emboldened. “I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was seven, shortly after I learned to read. On the one hand, how can you decide what you want to do when you’re seven? On the other hand, I never changed my mind.” She describes herself as having been “a natural contrarian” in youth. “I didn’t like being told what to do. In that sense I didn’t especially enjoy being a child. I liked the play aspect of childhood, but I really didn’t like the powerlessness of it. I couldn’t wait to get out from under.” She has said that there was “a very thin line in my family between God and my father.” Her most recent novel but one, Big Brother (2013), was inspired by the plight of her elder brother, Greg, about whom she wrote in 2009: “He’s topping 330 pounds: 24 stone. He was once 5ft 7in tall, but his vertebrae have compressed, and at 5ft 3in I now look him straight in the eye. I used to look up to him in every sense. I ended our last two visits in tears.” She added: “I doubt if he’ll see 60.” Hours after she filed the piece, Greg was admitted to hospital and died two days later, aged 55.
In Big Brother, the narrator Pandora’s account of meeting Greg’s fictional avatar, Edison, at the Cedar Rapids airport is pungent with shock and disgust and love. A “very large gentleman” is rolled into baggage claim “in an extrawide wheelchair”:
“Find that hard to believe.” Somewhere under all that fat was my brother’s sense of humor. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course!” My hands nowhere near met on his curved back.
In Bermondsey, Shriver lives with Jeff Williams, an American jazz drummer who has worked with Stan Getz, Joe Lovano, Paul Bley, and others. (Edison in Big Brother is a jazz pianist.) They have no children, but family matters show up in her fiction all the time. Williams is her second husband—she had what she calls a “starter marriage,” under pressure from her parents. And he was previously married to a literary agent who once acted for Shriver.
Success was in no hurry to catch Shriver. The Female of the Species came out in 1987. The six novels that followed in the next nine years were mostly well received, while creating no firm impression. A Perfectly Good Family (1996) made a dent in relations back home, however, causing a rift that took several years to heal. “The problem was that that novel dispelled the notion that I held my parents in a kind of awed esteem, which is what they expected. I represented them as mortal, with foibles and hypocrisies, like everyone else.” Funnily enough, she adds, “they took exception to all kinds of things that weren’t actually in the book. I never heard anything about the parts that were indeed precisely about them.” She has stated that “one line” that novel, hurt her father’s feelings: He “misconstrued it to mean that his daughter did not think him handsome.” Now that her father is in his 90s and her mother is in ill health, “I probably won’t write about them again until they’re dead.”
Shriver’s conversation, like her journalism, is seldom lit up by the name of a favorite prose writer or poet. She is a natural storyteller, with a direct narrative force, but her sentences do not in general draw attention to themselves. Toby Lichtig, fiction editor of the Times Literary Supplement, regards her as “notably wide-ranging in her subjects, applying a journalist’s restlessness to her authorial craft. I like this about her. Authors, as Hilary Mantel has said, are there to ‘bring us news’—and this is something Shriver has done very effectively over the course of her career. She’s a serious ideas novelist, but she doesn’t let the ideas get in the way of a good story.”
It was the slow-burning success of We Need to Talk About Kevin that bent the shape of her career into an upward-looking position. Published in 2003 by small houses in both the United States (Counterpoint) and Britain (Serpent’s Tail), it won the Orange Prize, at that time a prestigious award. When a sanguinary film directed by Lynne Ramsay was released in 2011, with Tilda Swinton in the role of Eva Khatchadourian—Kevin’s mother, who narrates the tale of a high-school massacre carried out by her son in a series of letters—success happened all over again. The latest Serpent’s Tail edition boasts, “One million copies sold.”
“We Need to Talk About Kevin was a sensation and the book that put her on the map,” Gail Winston says. “So of course people make the assumption that it was her first novel. It’s not unusual—authors are known for their most commercially successful book no matter where it falls in their writing career—but Lionel had written standout fiction before Kevin.” Shriver’s back catalogue returned to print, and she has written another five novels since Kevin. Property is her first collection of short fiction.
In her Spectator columns, written in a straight-from-the-shoulder style, Shriver tries to interrupt a conversation she sees as being controlled by the left. Unregulated immigration is a recurring topic. Official figures ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, she said in a recent piece headlined “Why Mass Immigration Explains the Housing Crisis.” The government, Shriver declared bluntly, “has a) no idea how to track people with every motivation to keep off the radar, and b) every motivation itself to underestimate an unpopular social phenomenon, with a range of adverse consequences, that it cannot seem to control. Do I sound bigoted?” Reduced to a single sentence, her view is “Current global demographics make open-border policies in the West untenable.” Fraser Nelson feels that while “there is a strong left-leaning consensus among the cultural elite in Britain, the public is different. The readership of the Spectator, neither broadly left nor right, responds positively to Lionel’s columns. She swims against the current, and readers like that.”
Shriver’s voice gathers heat as she steers the kitchen-table talk away from routine facts about her background—she spent 12 years in Belfast before moving to London—to what it means, in terms of her career, to be an outspoken public intellectual. “The left does more or less shape the literary sphere in the U.K. and in the U.S. So the people who make judgments about my books, and even determine whether or not they’re published, are left-wing. And if I’ve become too identified with the non-left, then my goose is cooked. I’m not even on the right—that’s the irony! And if my goose is cooked, then it’s just going to encourage all my colleagues to be paranoid and careful and to shut up.” Lichtig disagrees that any particular group “controls” the literary sphere in Britain or America. “This statement seems to me a classic example of Shriver’s tendency towards hyperbole—the sort of tendency that makes her an appealing columnist, particularly for right-wing outlets such as the Spectator.”
On June 12, Shriver was sacked as the sole judge for a short story competition organized by the British feminist quarterly Mslexia, after the journal’s editors voiced their dissatisfaction with comments made in Shriver’s Spectator column about the new “Inclusion Tracker” devised to measure the ethnic diversity of authors at Penguin Random House UK. Mslexia’s editor, Debbie Taylor, spoke of providing “a safe space for all women writers” and of welcoming “open debate” at the same time as announcing the removal of the woman writer with opposing views.
Another way to cook a goose was demonstrated by the novelist Ken Kalfus in a review of The Mandibles in the Washington Post in July 2016. A character in the dystopian tale—“a secondary character,” Shriver stresses—is suffering from advanced early-onset dementia and is apt to wander off into the labyrinthine city, placing herself and others in danger. Luella has married into the Mandible family, and as Shriver put it in the “prove you’re not a racist” Spectator column, she “happens to be black.” In order to curb her erratic behavior, family members guide her through the streets on a leash. Kalfus was dismissive of Shriver’s adventitious “happens to be.” The Mandibles are white, he stated pointedly; Luella, “the single African American in the family,” is physically restrained and led through the streets of lawless New York at the end of a cord. “If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.” In a follow-up article on the subject, Kalfus added that he was “thinking of ads in bus shelters and, honestly, I imagined they’d be wrecked.”
The Mandibles is not so far in film production. “I think it’d be fine,” Shriver replies when asked how she thinks any future adaptation would deal with the Luella question. “The action as described makes perfect sense. That reviewer”—whose name she claims to have forgotten, as she does the critic of Property in the Financial Times—“also said that you go for hundreds of pages in the book without a joke. I was far more offended by that than I was about the charge of racism, which I felt was so stupid that I couldn’t take it seriously. I want to have characters who are able to say whatever they want—things that maybe are offensive to certain people. I do not want to read books in which people only say the right thing! It would put me to sleep.”
Saying the “right thing” often means saying what everybody else is saying, following the happy liberal line, which, Shriver says, signals the virtue of the person pursuing it. “Isn’t it interesting how quickly that term ‘virtue-signaling’ caught on? There must have been a need for it.” For that reason, she has avoided writing about the current U.S. president in her fiction, including the novel she is working on now. “I tend to be topical as a novelist, but one of the pitfalls of topicality is that you run the risk of your books aging badly. I suspect that, post-Trump, nobody’s going to want to read about him.” Anyway, she says, Trump is “too broad” to make a good fictional character. “He’s crude and crudely self-drawn. There’s no art to him—no depth or irony. He would be implausible on the page.” The novel does, however, contain scenes with non-white characters. “We’ll see what happens with that.”
Before departing, I offer some remarks from an interview with Toni Morrison that appeared in the Paris Review 25 years ago. They concern one of the first battles fought on the field of cultural appropriation, though it was not called that then, over William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. A year later, a group of authors banded together and issued William Styron’s “Nat Turner”: Ten Black Writers Respond, in protest against a white Southerner’s depiction of the man who led a murderous slave revolt in 1831. Styron’s version was necessarily an invention. A thin pamphlet of “confessions” issued after Turner’s grisly execution gave him the title for his novel and generated more than 400 pages of lyrical first-person narrative. James Baldwin’s defense of Styron is well known: “He has begun the common history—ours.” Morrison’s much less so. The Paris Review interviewer ventured “a lot of people felt that Styron didn’t have a right to write about Nat Turner,” to which she replied: “He has a right to write about whatever he wants. To suggest otherwise is outrageous.”
Shriver appears vague about Styron’s novel, its date of appearance, and its historical inspiration, but is openly delighted by the Toni Morrison quote. “Good for her! Nobody’s saying that. Only I’m saying that. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t saying that. I’m not quite sure why it seems only to fall to me. I wish I had had that quote a long time ago.”
