In her nine novels, the American writer Lionel Shriver has never been afraid to show her characters’ dark side. Grimly, and sometimes comically, she explores marriage and family life as sources of powerful, unsettling emotion. In 2005, she won the Orange Prize for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” told from the point of view of the parent of a teenage school killer. In flashbacks, she shows us a tyrannical son and a mother who never loved him, leaving unresolved the question of which of the two is the monster.
Shriver’s maternal horror story touched a nerve and went on to sell about a million copies worldwide. In her next book she retreated from dark subjects: “The Post-Birthday World” was a romance, though a calculating one, about a woman choosing between a reliable and an attractive man.
In her new book, Shriver again takes the lid off domestic life, writing about the family, not with the delicate eye for marital discontent of a Rachel Cusk, but with the satirical flair of a Martin Amis. “So Much for That” is the story of Shepherd Knacker, a man in his late forties who has spent his life saving money. What he wants to buy with it, he says, is himself: he wants to relocate to a tropical paradise where he can live on almost nothing. He calls this plan the Afterlife—which is ironic, because just when he finally buys tickets for himself and his family to an island off the coast of Tanzania, his wife Glynis comes home and tells him she has cancer.
Glynis, an artist, is insured through Shep’s work—and in America’s market economy, Shep’s employer can choose to give him only partial coverage. Her illness is about to wipe out his life savings, and along with them his dream of the Afterlife.
This is the start of a wickedly brilliant book, especially in how it talks about money. We don’t like to think of the family as being part of the economic system, or of family ties as more financial than emotional. Barbara Ehrenreich once called the household the last socialist institution, because it’s the one place where people are still willing to share their toaster and their refrigerator. We like to see money as an instrument, not the essence of ourselves.
But Shriver shows us how monetary exchange can make its way into even the most intimate situations. Every person in this novel has a cash value, from a call girl to a woman dying of cancer. And everyone is defined by their relationship to money. Are they givers of money or takers of it? Do they feel more secure when they’re paying or when they’re being paid for?
If even life and death have become fiscal transactions, maybe it’s no surprise that American rebellion focuses on taxes. Shep’s best friend, Jackson, adds political commentary with his cranky assaults on various aspects of the System, claiming that the world is divided into “Patsies and Parasites, Saps and Spongers, Mugs and Moochers.” Then there’s Shep’s whiny sister, a critically successful but chronically broke documentary filmmaker who is “starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like a failure.” (The character, Shriver says, is based on herself before she achieved commercial success.)
The book never quite becomes sentimental, partly because the characters are all so stubbornly opinionated. Glynis refuses to become less difficult as she suffers. When her sister remarks cautiously that illness doesn’t always bring out the best in people, she replies, “But maybe the best in me, for me, isn’t the best in me for you. Maybe the best in me, for me, is that I’m spiteful and vindictive and wish deadly diseases on everyone.”
During a reading in Amsterdam, Shriver said that she began the book after one of her best friends died of cancer. The treatment cost $2 million and extended her friend’s life perhaps three months. (The courageous and optimistic “battle against cancer” is another American commonplace that Shriver tears to shreds.) Then she read in the paper that the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the US was not the mortgage crisis, but hospital bills.
By the end, Shriver afflicts her characters with not one but three different deadly diseases, plus personal bankruptcy and a penis enlargement operation gone wrong. Meanwhile, the book that begins as a critique of American health care has become something much more. Ultimately, it’s a moving exploration of big themes, from the eternal—death and taxes—to the existential: the purpose of work; the bonds of families; the power of married love, the way we cope, or fail to cope, with death. Shriver doesn’t like to say what you expect. Instead, her powerful intellect and her sensitivity show on every page, from the ominous start to the surprisingly redemptive ending.
Moral discomfort
Minister’s daughter Lionel Shriver (North Carolina, USA, 1957) has been described as “ferociously intelligent, uncompromising, independent, contrary, passionate, and scorchingly funny.” Born Margaret Ann, she felt “alienated” from her name and switched to Lionel at 15. Her novels deal with politics, morality, and the problem of taking the clean knife of ethics to the soup of everyday life. “I like to craft characters who are hard to love,” she says. “I use my characters to examine aspects of myself of which I’m suspicious, or with which I’m not terribly comfortable.” Thus she wrote her best-known book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” when she herself was wondering if she should try to have a child: what if she had one she didn’t like? Though her books are often set in America, Shriver spent 12 years reporting from Belfast and now lives with her husband in London.
Trouw, December 18, 2010. So Much for That by Lionel Shriver (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).