I’m no racist
Lionel Shriver hits back at the critics
‘My week has become busier than I planned,” says Lionel Shriver, easing into a kitchen chair and taking the first of many drags on an e-cigarette. The front curtains of her home in south-east London are drawn shut, and the front of her house is rather gloomy, although the sun is shining on the back garden. If it gives the impression of shutting the street out, maybe that’s understandable. For the past six days the American novelist, best known for 2003’s We Need To Talk
About Kevin, and, more recently, for speaking her mind on divisive issues, has been at the centre of a blazing row about diversity in publishing. Or, as she puts it, a “tempest in a teacup”.
The trouble began in The Spectator, where Shriver used her monthly column to rail against an email from the publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) announcing its goal for “both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025… taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”. Shriver took objection. “Drunk on virtue,” she wrote, “Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books… we can safely infer [from PRH’S new policy] that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling.”
Twitter went bananas. Articles criticising Shriver appeared on several websites, including The Guardian.
Mslexia, a British magazine for female writers, fired her as the judge for a short story contest. And members of Write now, a PRH mentoring scheme designed to encourage diversity, wrote an open letter challenging the article. Critics argued Shriver was presenting literary excellence and diversity as being mutually exclusive, and glossing over the difficulties minority authors face in trying to get published. Nikesh Shukla, a novelist and editor, tweeted that Shriver was “blaming her own irrelevance on diversity”.
“It’s wilful misinterpretation,” says Shriver, taking a break from cleaning her home which she is about to hand over to housesitters while she and husband Jeff, a jazz musician, spend the summer in New York. “Opinions are being imputed to me, and to that column, which neither I nor the column profess. It’s malicious. I was amused and concerned by the letter from Penguin Random House because it seemed to me they were aiming for diversity quotas. They deny it, saying it was an aspiration, but that’s just semantics. If you’re aiming to mirror the proportions of [minority] groups in the UK, that’s a quota. We’ve got to the point where diversity is sacrosanct, and you can’t say anything even in the vicinity of that word that is short of worshipful.
“Diversity is a laudable goal, and I’ve never said anything else, but it shouldn’t be the primary goal if your company is meant to be doing something else. What’s being imputed to me is that I believe diversity leads to a lower quality of writing, and you don’t have to take that very far to figure out that’s essentially a white supremacist position, that white people are better at writing and minority people are crap. I did not go on some ugly screed about how rubbish black and Asian and gay writers are. Why would I do that?
“I should add I think Write now is wonderful, the kind of effort at diversifying publishing I wholly support. It’s not a quota, it’s a programme which aggressively tries to find people who haven’t had much opportunity in the past and puts them together with other writers. I don’t oppose that, I applaud it.”
But can she not see at all why readers objected? Even in a generous light, it’s not hard to imagine the line about a “gay transgender Caribbean” writer might come across as dismissive.
“First, that’s been taken out of context,” she says. “It’s a column, not written to be read in snippets. You have to read the whole thing. I have no doubt that half the people on Twitter who are up in arms haven’t read it. Second, I’m a columnist. It’s a form. I have a style and it’s sometimes a little wacky or hyperbolic. I don’t expect you to be on the floor laughing, but it’s supposed to be droll, over the top. My idea of funny is the humourless’s idea of offensive, because they refuse to get the joke. There’s nothing in that sentence that’s actually making fun of those people, nothing in the line that’s derogatory about transgenders or Caribbeans or disabled people. It’s making fun of the publishing company.”
She laughs when I mention Mslexia magazine and its decision to remove her as the judge for its competition.
“I found it highly comical. I got an email yesterday from someone whose name I don’t remember, which started, ‘You must have been expecting this,’ and I thought, ‘What? I’d forgotten all about it’. My first response [to being removed as the judge] was, ‘Oh, brilliant,’ because I’d only agreed to do it as a big favour. It’s not a big prize.”
The row, she says, is symptomatic of a toxic online environment. “We are hard-wired to enjoy outrage. It’s a very satisfying emotion because it gives you this sense of superiority. I wouldn’t say that exclusively of the Left-wing; we’re all prey to it. But social media has an accelerant built in. One person gets a little dismayed, the next person has to become distraught, the following person has to add more value and become outraged. We’re dealing with a world that thrives on antagonism and is always on the lookout for new enemies, or recycling old ones, and I’m afraid I now qualify as recycled. I have a target painted on my forehead.”
Another way of putting it would be that Shriver has previous, which makes it hard not to suspect she had some idea of what she was doing. In 2016, she used a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival to attack the idea of cultural appropriation, the adoption of aspects of a minority culture by members of a dominant culture. For some of her address she donned a sombrero, a reference to an incident in America in which non-mexican students had been threatened with disciplinary action for doing the same at a tequila party.
“The online mob is prone to rabid overreaction and tends towards groupthink, but my concern is when it decides to reinterpret what you’ve actually said as something completely different. It’s now accepted as fact I wore a sombrero for the whole thing. I put it on for the final three words as a comic flourish. I find this stuff Orwellian. It’s entirely possible I’ll have to correct this [latest] mistake for years, denying over and over that I ever claimed diversity leads to lower literary standards. It really boils down to the accusation that I’m racist, and I don’t think that’s fair.”
Shriver believes society as a whole, both online and off, is becoming “hypersensitive”. “People are getting very uptight about what they can and cannot say. I hope we’re going through a phase, because the alternative is for everything to get worse and more sensitive and more prescriptive. But I think it’s entirely possible something terrible happens – a world war, or someone drops a nuclear weapon – which will produce a real sense of perspective. It’s a luxury to worry about columns in The Spectator, and fall out all week over it.”
She seems to accept that all this now affects how her fiction is seen, especially by some critics. Less charitable voices might suggest her controversial journalism is keeping her in the headlines when her fiction is not.
“For a novelist, it would be more strategic to stay out of journalism or politics. Don’t go near anything to do with race, or LGBTQ, or any of the other minority groups. That’s the smart thing to do.”
One other solution occurs to her. “I could die. I’m starting to look forward to it.”
‘We are hard-wired to enjoy outrage. It’s a satisfying emotion because it gives you a sense of superiority’