Ruth Margalit
Property: Stories Between Two Novellas by Lionel Shriver
Property:
Stories Between Two Novellas by Lionel Shriver.
Harper, 317 pp., $26.99
In Lionel Shriver’s world, there are “Mugs” and there are “Mooches.” Mooches live off the generosity of Mugs, who work, pay taxes, build up insurance deductibles, and generally follow the rules. In our warped society, Shriver’s books argue time and again, Mugs are suckers and Mooches are winners. It’s a division she laid out in the starkest terms in her tenth and perhaps most devastating novel, So Much for That (2010), which served, albeit in novelistic form, as a timely indictment of the American health care system. All his life, Shep Knacker had been a Mug. Forty-eight years old, he had single-handedly provided for his wife, Glynis, and their two children, paid exorbitant rent on their house in Westchester, and made out the occasional “loan”— never repaid—to his selffinancing filmmaker sister. “It struck him,” Shriver writes, “how people who acted above money—arty types like his sister or his Old-Testament father— were the same folks who never earned any to speak of.” Meanwhile, Shep had been penny-pinching for his idea of “the Afterlife”: early retirement on a remote African island where his savings would support the family blissfully ever after. But on the night Shep finally buys one-way plane tickets and announces his plan to Glynis, she remains eerily quiet. “I’m afraid I will need your health insurance,” she finally tells him. It’s good-bye, Afterlife. Hello, mesothelioma.
Soon, Glynis is withering before his eyes. So is their savings account, which dwindles from $731,778 to $3,492 in a single year, precipitated by a health insurance company “from hell” and an out-of-network specialist foisted on them by a doctor who infers, infuriatingly, that, “given the stakes,” money “is no object.” To drive the point home with a sledgehammer, Shriver presents us with another Mug, Shep’s best friend, Jackson, whose teenage daughter suffers from a rare degenerative condition that requires constant medical intervention. If it wasn’t clear just how emasculated these Mugs are, Jackson undergoes a penile enlargement operation—horribly botched.
Jackson has long known what Shep is only now beginning to find out: that insurers count on people like him to fork out whatever it takes to care for their loved ones, that “sneakily, little by little, the Mooches had hijacked a system that hadn’t started out half as bad into a situation that would have mortified the founding fathers.” It is hard not to read the soliloquy-prone Jackson as a mouthpiece for his author, who doesn’t shy away from injecting politics into her work and public life. In 2016, Shriver caused controversy when she wore a sombrero while giving a speech in which she assailed the aversion to “cultural appropriation” in literature. “This latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice,” she said. In that speech, Shriver spoke of the novelist’s right to imagine characters of any ethnic or cultural background, without having to worry that the “culture police” will find such portrayals inauthentic.
Whatever you make of Shriver’s politics, there is, in many of her books, an authenticity problem with minority characters—but not for the reasons she thinks. How credible can a character be if one of the only things we learn about her is her “enthusiasm for Obama” or that she “preferred Django Unchained to Twelve Years a Slave”? One whose “single cornrow” others find “mesmerizing”? Who says things like “Me and Liam, we awake”? And yet, at a time when the novel is being maligned as an irrelevant literary genre, the defense may do well to present Shriver’s body of work as Exhibit A. Her novels have an almost prescient way of conjuring imminent disaster. From a mass shooting at a school in her breakout novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), to obesity and self-image in Big Brother (2013), to a financial meltdown and a border wall that separates the United States from Mexico in The Mandibles (2016), Shriver has become one of the more effective social commentators of our post-truth era, a veritable “Cassandra of American letters,” as Ruth Franklin described her in The New York Times Book Review.
The specificity Shriver sometimes lacks on a small scale—in character development; in what motivates an individual, not a type—is very much alive in her descriptions of large social forces. In the not-too-distant future laid out in The Mandibles, for instance, Hispanics have overtaken Caucasians as the majority population in the United States, so that you now have to “press two for English.” Reality has become so conflated with reality show that Judge Judy has been named a Supreme Court Justice. In this kind of environment, Shriver seemed to forewarn her readers, who knows who might be elected president? Property,
Shriver’s new collection of short stories, is bookended by two novellas, the latter of which, The Subletter, features the ultimate Mooch. It is set in Belfast, where Shriver lived for over a decade and which she evokes with all the passion and ferocity of a spurned lover. Sara, Shriver’s protagonist, is a “professional American”: she writes a column for the Belfast Telegraph called “Yankee Doodles” that is supposed to lend an American sensibility to local news and to offer insight into events in the United States. “Ironically,” Shriver writes, “it was a lukewarm allegiance to Uncle Sam that had facilitated her expatriation in the first place.”
And yet Sara’s adopted city hardly proves better.
Sara had never quite located the backslapping, more-the-merrier animation that was ostensibly so Irish, and definitive of Belfast’s holy grail of “good crack.” Perhaps the renowned boisterousness and loquacity that attracted American tourists to the island was a myth; sure Sara’s sampling of pub life was duller and meaner than cliché would have it.
Even the magnificent Irish hillsides are deceiving: “It rained here all day, every day, and that was why the pastureland gleamed such a seductive green.” Into this landscape enters Emer, another American woman, new to Belfast and searching for a place to stay. Sara suspects that Emer is a “conflict junkie” or, worse, a nationalist—a person who suffers not only from self-pity but from “triumphalist self-pity.” Still, out of some vague idea that she might soon be leaving for Bangkok, Sara offers Emer her apartment. Except she never ends up going. The apartment becomes, not unlike Northern Ireland itself, a flashpoint between two people. To make matters worse, Emer turns out to be an inconsiderate slob who ravages Sara’s pantry:
Emer was a taker. Everywhere she went she would siphon off a little more than she gave back. The Emers of this world were levied on the whole species, like a tax. She pulled the pickpocketing off partly by being attractive, but also by being arty and passionate. She was dedicating her life to justice, empathy, and lamentation. The least the philistine ruck could do was to take up her logistical slack.
Emer is in Belfast to write a memoir. (Lest you be tempted to roll your eyes and hiss “Millenial!,” the novella takes place in 1998.) This is telling because, in Shriver’s writing, Mooches are inextricably linked to the arts. “Ever notice how these arty bohemian types think we owe them a living?” Jackson asks Shep in So Much for That. “As if we’re all supposed to feel so grateful that they’re creating meaning and beauty for us poor uncultured Neanderthals.” Curiously for a writer who toiled on seven novels in near obscurity before Kevin was published, Shriver seems to have remarkably little patience for striving artists. Or maybe it’s that she demands more from them: not solely an inclination for the craft but also the labor to back it up. While much in her latest collection deals—as its title suggests—with real estate and the notion of ownership, it could just as easily have been titled Work. Mugs have jobs; Mooches don’t. “It was curious how furious it made some people that you didn’t want to ‘make something of yourself,’” she writes, tongue-in-cheek, in The Standing Chandelier, the book’s other novella—a rather saccharine tale of a friendship’s unwinding that turns, as nearly all her stories do, very bitter.
It comes as little surprise to learn that Shriver is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She is an unforgiving writer. Her books are astringent, cautionary; they tend to spiral downward. “We are both hard-working, self-righteous and cheap,” Shriver once wrote of herself and her father (though unlike him, she