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.”