This is the stuff of dispute
Shriver’s properties are clear to see, writes Stephen Mccauley
It’s hard to imagine anyone accusing Lionel Shriver of being a timid writer. The author of 12 novels – including the international bestseller and Orange Prize winner We Need to Talk
About Kevin – Shriver tackles such complicated, zeitgeist-tapping topics as school shootings, the American healthcare system and anxiety about the national debt. After tackling them, she wrestles them to the ground with a novelist’s appreciation for nuance and a journalist’s grasp of facts and attention to detail.
Shriver’s intellect and talent, her political convictions and her impressive confidence are all on display in Property: Stories Between Two Novellas, her assertive, frequently funny and altogether satisfying first collection of shorter fiction. The book’s epigraph from EM Forster poses an overarching question: “What is the effect of property upon the character?” Shriver sinks her teeth into this query in the novellas that anchor both ends of the book and the ten stories that shore up the middle. A woman buys a repossessed house from the bank only to have her life upended by ghosts from the evicted owner’s past. A man’s relationship with his father is forever altered by a squabble over £160 and the price of an airmail stamp. A mother’s desire for an empty nest leads her to bounce her unmotivated 32-year-old son on to the street, making him a spokesman for the disenfranchised. A tube of Chapstick resolves a man’s indecisiveness about seeing his difficult, dying father for the last time.
In The Standing Chandelier, the emotionally sophisticated, irony-laced novella that opens the collection, a decades-long, mostly platonic friendship between a woman named Jillian and a man named Weston ends when he gets engaged and agrees to his fiancée’s demand that he stop seeing Jillian. The friendship, he realises, is more important to him than he has cared to admit: “The more sizable a sacrifice his fiancée appeared to be demanding, the more amply it was demonstrated that she was right to demand it.”
The friends part amiably enough, but any lingering good feelings are reduced to rubble by an argument over an eccentric piece of art that both households consider their own. “The ties between the two parties had been severed. All that remained was stuff.” Thus Jillian concludes that “she had nothing to lose by savaging his good opinion of her, and one thing to gain: her chandelier.” Suspense – here and elsewhere in the collection – depends not on who gets the guy (or girl) but who gets the “stuff ”.
Shriver’s settings range from
Brooklyn to Belfast to London. She is equally adept at inhabiting male and female characters, and equally convincing with natives of the United States and Britain. (Not surprising, since she divides her time between Brooklyn and London.)
Despite this variety, Property feels more unified than many story collections, and reading it has many of the satisfactions of reading a novel. This is largely due to Shriver’s commitment to exploring her theme. From one story to the next, the acquisition of things – land, money, empty nests – rarely leads to happiness and often stimulates character traits that might better be kept in check. As the disillusioned narrator of ‘Vermin’ observes after she and her husband have come to regret buying a house they’d loved renting: “There may be such a thing as becoming too responsible.” ■