Conflicts arising out of possession and territory
Property Lionel Shriver, Borough €18.19
THIS collection of stories is bookended by two novellas, one of which, The Subletter, is quoted on the back cover: “You could own something just by taking care of it... You could also own something through violation.”
Lionel Shriver is interested in tangible things: about when, for instance, a wedding gift becomes a burden (Repossession), and the challenges of house-buying (Vermin). But — considering Shriver’s other life, as a journalist and provocateur — it seems to me that there are other forms of property she doesn’t believe in: for instance, the experience of being black, which some claim (to her dismay) that only black writers can write about. Are certain subjects owned by writers from particular backgrounds?
Channelling (but not citing) George Eliot, Shriver claims that “the spirit of good fiction is one of exploration, generosity, curiosity, audacity, and compassion... fiction helps to fell the exasperating barriers between us, and for a short while allows us to behold the astonishing reality of other people.” She isn’t alone in protesting against the constrictions that identity politics set on literature. For the academic David Bromwich, good fiction must exercise the “moral imagination” — by making us enter, and understand, other minds.
But Shriver doesn’t appear to practise what she preaches: her self-conscious protagonists tend to carry resentment like a virus into all their encounters, failing to get beyond themselves. The point may be to press the reader toward their own act of moral imagination (ironising these voices) but these are, in the end, the sort of people the author is interested in, and whose snowballing insecurities she’d have us accept, dispiritingly, as those of human nature.
Shriver’s style can be turbulently good, or jumbled to no good end; but it seems pointless to criticise her for, say, pile-ups of speech-tags — “Jillian asked tentatively”, “Paige said stonily” — or imprecision: “As they coupled, too, he couldn’t help but notice the odd tear drizzle [sic] down her temple and pool in her ear.” Her jam-packed, dash-happy sentences arrive in noisy spasms because her metier is conflict, is amplification.
This was clear in her breakthrough novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin — crammed with as much explosive as, one feels, the author could muster. In retrospect, it is a work of grotesque freewheeling exaggeration. (Shriver gives her school-shooter a crossbow, and has him destroy his sister’s eye with drain cleaner.) Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 film recognises this, and becomes, I think, a black comedy.
Perhaps that novel was really a cry of anguish from Kevin’s neglected, idealised little sister (the detail with the eye is so over-the-top).
Shriver has spoken of growing up a tomboy, and in another novel, Big Brother (2013), transformed her sibling’s death from over-eating into a narrative energised by cross-currents of vindictiveness and affection.
There are moments, in fact, when Big Brother seems to contradict her new stance on experience as property, for (rather like the writers of colour Shriver opposes) the narrator does feel that her brother’s experiences are being appropriated: “Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else’s business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother.”
Shriver remains at her best when writing about families. In this collection, Exchange Rates concerns father and son (“Harold didn’t condescend to his younger son exactly, and Elliot hated to think that he might still be yearning for his father’s approval”), as does The ChapStick, in which Peter Dimmock, raging mentally at his father, is prevented from seeing him before he dies when held up by two black officials at the airport.