Books
Kevin can wait
by Diana Wichtel
Lionel Shriver has gone from saying that motherhood sucks to claiming that a man can be a woman’s top priority. What happened?
The last time I spoke to Lionel Shriver, she was about to win the Orange Prize and be propelled (along with an unfortunate photo of her giving the event’s statuette an unintentionally lascivious-looking kiss) into the literary limelight. Her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was a cracker of a story about a delinquent toddler who grows up to be a high-school mass murderer. Kevin’s father, Franklin, endlessly indulged the little tyke. Mom, Eva, never took to the little fiend. Except for the body count, it could be any dysfunctional family.
Shriver talked then about how, heading into her forties, the book helped her resolve her down-to-the-wire debate with herself about having children. “It did convince me that if this was what came out when I started imagining being a mother, then I probably wasn’t up to it,” she said blithely at the time.
Two years later, Shriver is in town for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and to push her latest work, a doorstop of a novel called The Post-Birthday World (HarperCollins, $36.99). Just off the plane, she looks terrific for nearly 50 – tiny, toned, pony-tailed. “No kids,” the photographer and I mutter darkly. “Yeah,” she says. “One of the secrets of youth.”
As you’d expect of one who says, “I can’t open my mouth and write a sentence without offending 50 people”, Shriver is direct, well-defended and … different. An American woman who gave herself an unambiguously male name (didn’t fancy Margaret Ann), she bikes across London to literary parties and likes to wear the same clothes for a week. Sure enough, the tomboy outfit of lemon polo and white jeans I chat to turns up again next morning to be interviewed by Kay on Breakfast.
So as things stand in the life/art stakes, it’s Novels: 8. Children: 0. You have to ask: did she make the right decision? The answer amounts to a resolute “maybe”. “I’ve been single-minded about establishing myself as a novelist. That stayed at the top of my list for a long time. My whole reproductive life.” As the new book sets out to demonstrate, whatever you choose, there’s always a price. All that ambition – “It kept me developmentally retarded.”
Recently, someone asked if she’d have been more likely to have had children had success come 10 or 15 years earlier. “It made me think. I thought the chances would have been higher,” she allows. “That is not,” she insists, “the same thing as regret.”
As one of The Post-Birthday World’s characters observes. timing is everything. Post the Virginia Tech killings, the media certainly wanted to talk to Shriver, just not about the new book. “It’s the second time that’s happened,” sighs Shriver of the inundation. “There was the cluster of school killings culminating in that Amish shooting, which was particularly ghastly. But this time it’s completely over the top. In the hundreds.”
She did a few – “Just a tiny proportion of what I could have done if I really wanted to go to town on it.” Even that drew some flak. “There’s been a lot of blogging that I think I’m some kind of expert on this phenomenon, which I don’t. People are coming after me. I’m the one who keeps saying ‘Excuse me, I’m a fiction writer. I just made one of these shootings up.’” There was even speculation that the gunman had imitated the manner of killing in Kevin. “It’s not as if fiction writers invented violence. That’s not where it started.”
Shriver took on less contentious territory, you would have thought, with The Post-Birthday World. Irina McGovern, children’s book illustrator, has been living with Lawrence, a smug American who works for a terrorism think tank, for years before she falls for the wide-boy charms of their friend Ramsey, a professional snooker player. There’s a moment where they kiss or, in another version, don’t kiss. In alternate chapters, the book then follows Irina down both possible paths, with both slightly defective men. All very Sliding Doors.
If it sounds like superior chick lit, at one level it is. Shriver is expert at characters who are just as irritating as the sort of people you might actively avoid in real life. Her quest for the fresh sexual simile – Irina feels her breasts’ “heat, like the seat-warmers in expensive cars” – can be gruelling.
Ramsey’s stage mockney locutions – “Oi, no mistake. But it’s queer how the thing what most attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them” – have drawn howls of derision from some British critics. Any adults who eat as much popcorn as Irina and Lawrence deserve to break up.
But, despite the snooker bits, the book, and Shriver’s odd, unflinching perspective, do grow on you. As in the sort of imperfect relationships it charts, a bit of work and commitment are repaid in the end with some insights into the endless personal choices we’re besieged by these complex days and their often renegade outcomes. As Ramsey says at one sad point, “There are different sorts of betrayal … all manner of desertions.”
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