Brusquely tender portrait of death and enduring love
Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins, $32.99)
Reviewed by Wendy Smith Lionel Shriver first gained widespread literary recognition with We Need to Talk About Kevin, an unsettling novel about a woman whose 15-year-old son commits a school massacre. Shriver has continued to ground her fiction in topical subjects: The Mandibles imagined Mexico building a wall to keep out its desperate northern neighbours, and So Much for That took a satiric look at one man’s struggles with the US healthcare system.
She turns her attention to her adopted homeland in Should We Stay or Should We Go, which uses a middle-aged British couple’s decision to commit suicide together on the wife’s 80th birthday as a springboard to a dozen alternate outcomes. They run the gamut from blackly funny to apocalyptic, with a few surprisingly cheerful stops along the way.
Kay and Cyril Wilkinson make their pact in October 1991 at their home in Lambeth, South London. They’ve just returned from the funeral of her father, whose 14-year mental and physical deterioration has been so exhausting, says Kay, ‘‘he used up even the miserable amount of energy we’d need to celebrate the fact that he’s dead at last’’.
Readers of Shriver’s previous work will recognise the bluntly unsentimental attitude, and the smooth way she inserts essential details into the couple’s postfuneral conversation. Kay is 51, Cyril 52; he’s an idealistic socialist, she’s more pragmatic and conservative. They both work for the National Health Service – she’s a nurse, he’s a GP – so they see the consequences of lives extended beyond people’s ability to care for themselves. They don’t seem especially attached to their three children: self-dramatising Hayley, selfserving Roy and dutiful Simon. Suicide is Cyril’s idea, which will prove significant later, but Kay agrees, and she’s no pushover – which will also prove significant.
Shriver quickly sketches the couple’s trajectory across three decades before the appointed day in 2020, planting plot seeds that will flower in multiple ways. Mercifully, Shriver also offers Cyril and Kay a few happier possible futures, though it’s probably telling that she titles the most optimistic chapter ‘‘Once Upon a Time in Lambeth’’.
Should We Stay or Should We Go can appear heartless as the author rearranges her plot pieces with almost insolent ease, disdaining anything as cheap as an appeal for readers’ emotional engagement.
It’s only gradually apparent that this sharp-elbowed satire is also a brusquely tender portrait of enduring love. In many chapters, Cyril and Kay end up experiencing old age, whether via surprisingly successful second careers, physical decline or more cataclysmic bad ends – and there are a lot of those.